Quality over Quantity

"The galaxy still bears the scars of the horde. But it will learn to fear the lance."

— Warlord Okeer, Mass Effect 2

It's no secret that there's always an inverse relationship with quantity and quality. For whatever reason, a lot of writers tend to take the side of quality.

It's likely because it's commonly viewed as being easier to produce many things with little effort than producing a single thing with a lot of effort. At times, this is often intended as a Take That! towards companies who subscribe to the above theory by making cheap but low-quality products.

Oftentimes, the protagonists in a given work are a small elite group pitted against a large force of poorly trained, undisciplined mooks. Possibly because throwing away the lives of people on your own side is seen as unethical.

Few examples point that this message can be misused, quality with quantity beats quality without quantity. Generally, Real Life inverts this: unless the smaller side has a considerable advantage in technology or training, sheer quantity usually wins out.

Conservation of Ninjutsu is a demonstration of this trope, while Zerg Rush is a specific inversion of it. Compare Gideon Ploy.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• A dilemma that Section 9 has to deal with in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. The Big Bad of the second season points out that no matter how good the members of Section 9 are, they will still lose if they are outnumbered. Batou later has to decide whether he should decrease the difficulty for new recruits to join S9, knowing that doing so would reduce the overall quality and potential each member has. Ultimately, in "Solid State Society", Section 9 has expanded its ranks.
• In Pokémon: The Series, this is the argument that Ash Ketchum uses whenever it's pointed out that Gary Oak is more proficient at catching large numbers of Pokémon. Indeed, the series repeatedly shows that while Ash typically catches a small number of Pokémon in each region (Unova being a notable exception), he's able to focus that much more attention and training on each one, thus bringing out its full potential.
• My Hero Academia:
  • The League of Villains makes its debut in a brazen attack on UA school grounds with a large number of thugs. However, most of them are just that, thugs bested by students who had just barely started their training. Only three of them were particularly dangerous. Starting with the Training Camp arc, however, the League changes gears, using a smaller number of exceptionally powerful villains. They see a lot more success once they make this change.
  • This becomes the official position regarding the training and induction of new heroes following All Might's retirement, as demonstrated by their changes to the first Provisional Licensing Exam to follow it. Prior exams are stated to have a 50% pass/fail rate, the first post-All Might exam starts by passing only the first one hundred students out of over 1,500, meaning less than 10% make it to the second stage of the test. However, those who failed the second half, just over a dozen, are given the opportunity to take special supplementary lessons and take a second test later to get their license then. The logic behind that decision is that the hundred who passed the first phase all have great potential that they want to see reached. So while the pass rate is drastically reduced, the effort to make sure everyone who has proven they have the quality are nurtured to excellence.
• Naruto:
  • This lesson is taken very literally regarding the Hidden Rain Village (Amegakure). Geographically, Ame is the smallest location in the Naruto world. Their history was dismal, littered by war after war and serving as nothing more than a battlefield. However, all of the fighting raised some of the most infamous and powerful ninja in the series; Hanzo of the Salamander, Pain and Konan may be just a select few. But at some point in the series, each had proven to give even Leaf-native shinobi a moment of Oh, Crap! This cements the point that even the tiniest countries can still make bigger places quake in fear.
  • In the same boat as Ame, the Hidden Mist Village (Kirigakure) is the smallest of the Five Great Nations. Located in the Land of Water, Kiri has had a very long history of violence and infighting. It became The Dreaded through its brutal regime of raising the most lethal and murderous ninja around. In fact, you could only become a ninja after killing your classmates. As you can imagine, this made the foreign nations stay wary of the Hidden Mist, going so far as to nickname it the "Village of the Bloody Mist". Fortunately during Boruto's Era, the Hidden Mist mostly grew out of their vicious reputation, but don't think they've become weak because of this.
  • Historically, the Hidden Sand Village (Sunagakure) simply survived through this trope alone. With nothing but a large desert, and making a whole heap of bad decisions. Suna was always losing out the most, between the Five Great Nations. Their stubborn independence costed them four of their Kazekage, two of their most powerful Puppeteers, and their only Tailed Beast Shukaku. However, they still had very skilled ninja on their side. Though that still isn't saying very much, compared to the rest of the village.
  • The Sharingan is one of the Three Great Dōjutsu. Between the Byakugan and the Rinnegan, the Sharingan can cast an overpowered range of illusions and reality-altering abilities. However, unlike the latter two it can and will go blind if exhausted, meaning its power must be used sparingly, along with prolonged rest.
• In One Piece:
  • The Straw Hat Pirates are one of the smallest pirate crews in the series, but nevertheless are one of the most powerful due to its members each being a One-Man Army. This trope was summed up quite brilliantly when they went up against the New Fishman Pirates with ten members against their army of 100,000. The Straw Hats won easily. Outside of combat, each member is an absolute genius in their field of expertise (e.g.: Nami's sea navigation, Sanji's culinary skills, and Chopper's medical knowledge). It's to the point that a whole team of people in any given field covered by one of the Straw Hats likely can't compare to that one member's skill level.
  • The Red-Haired Pirates are also this compared to their peers who run the New World. The Big Mom Pirates, the Whitebeard Pirates, the Blackbeard Pirates, and the Animal Kingdom Pirates are all numerous in membership, with at minimum hundreds of crewmembers and a small group of leaders who command groups of them. The Red-Haired Pirates, on the other hand, are only about a dozen people in number, but every one of them is a Person of Mass Destruction. As stated by Word of God and later confirmed in the final saga, the Red-Haired Pirates are similar in organization to fellow Emperor crew Straw Hat Pirates: each member sans the captain is a Big Officer and the crew has a fleet made of subordinate crews which are not commanded directly.

Fan Works

• In the Naruto fanfic Son of the Sannin, after the failed Uchiha Coup Jiraiya makes a full reform on the Konoha Ninja academy's program, focusing on this. While the amount of graduated students is reduced drastically, the ones that do graduate are much stronger and more skilled, and thus better prepared for the "real world".
• In Traveler, shortly after Ash obtains his fourth badge, he also gains his fifth pokémon. Gary, his main rival, has dozens. However, Ash's pokémon are all extensively trained (except Magmar, his newest) while most of Gary's just have some TM moves and are otherwise rather subpar overall.

Films — Live-Action

• The good guys in Star Wars tend to subscribe to this philosophy: a highly trained and well-equipped clone army in the prequels, and better-armed and -defended fighters in the original trilogy and EU. The bad guys, meanwhile? Millions of flimsy, rock-stupid battle droids for the Trade Federation, while the Empire sticks millions of Stormtroopers in a Highly-Conspicuous Uniform and sets the passing score to 5% at the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy. Which is inexplicable really, since it means the Empire completely reversed its doctrines between trilogies.
  • To the Sith, this was the point of the Rule of Two. Unlike the Jedi, who can have many apprentices, the Sith believe that only a master and an apprentice is enough. The Dark Side is believed to be like poison, the more apprentices who study under a master, the less potent the poison becomes. Which is why the greatest Sith Lords, would rather train a single, refined student, than a whole group of possibly lackluster apprentices.
• The heroes in The Lord of the Rings. Vastly outnumbered but far better trained and armed forces on the side of good vs. a massive horde of undisciplined Orcs and savage Uruk-hai who usually win by steamrolling the opposition with their sheer numbers.
  • Curiously, it was not like this in the books. While the forces of evil are clearly more and outnumber the heroes to the point of hopelessness, the big battles show the uses of strategy and cunning by Sauron's servants. While they still fall into We Have Reserves mentality, it is still not so blatant as in the movies. Also, the orcs are a pretty crafty and capable people, when they are not killing each other over any reason (a lot of Sauron's will is used to keep the orcs in line and obedient. And even then, they still find ways to make disasters like Cirith-Ungol)

Literature

• The novelization of The Karate Kid (the original one) had Daniel complain to Mr. Miyagi before the tournament that he didn't know very many moves. Miyagi replied that he was better than the Cobra-Kais at the ones he did know.
  • This is a reference to a quote by Bruce Lee, who said to the effect that it is better to practice one kick a thousand times, than practice a thousand kicks once.
• Honor Harrington:
  • A recurring theme for the Royal Manticoran Navy, due in no small part to their primary threat being the expansive People's Republic of Haven, whose fleet they could not hope to match in numbers. Over the course of several decades, King Roger, and after his death, his daughter Queen Elizabeth, funded a series of secret R&D projects which, when paired with a very aggressive shipbuilding program, meant the war between Manticore and Haven was a long series of Superweapon Surprises for the Havenites to deal with.
  • The Manticoran Alliance faces a similar problem when war breaks out with the Solarian League. The Solarians have more superdreadnoughts than Manticore have cruisers, but their technology and doctrine are several centuries out of date because no one has dared fight them until now and they grew overly confident in their presumed superiority. The primary concern held by the Manticorans is that they may run out of ammo before the Solarians run out of ships.
• The local militaries on planets where Hammer's Slammers are hired usually have more personnel, but they also tend towards some combination of incompetence, poor discipline, and/or low tech. The Slammers are disciplined, competent, and equipped with the best Hover Tanks and Plasma Cannons money can buy. Whoever can afford their rates tends to win.
• The Roman Legionaires in Ranks of Bronze are a bit of a variant. Individually they're no better, if not inferior, to most of the "barb" warriors their alien masters send them against, but they're trained to act as cohesive units that when in formation can take on vastly superior numbers of disorganized barbs.
• In Overgeared, the Tzedarak guild has fewer than 20 people and prefers to avoid conflict with other guilds. The Giant Guild has over 200 and goes after Tzedarak frequently, just to prove they're "better" and should have a higher rank. Tzedarak cleans their clock. Every. Single. Time. It gets especially bad for Giant Guild when Grid, the protagonist, joins Tzedarak and upgrades their gear. Giant Guild tries to straight up kidnap Grid, and although Giant Guild does have the early advantage due to a cowardly sneak attack and drawing away the powerhouses from Grid's defense, not only do the powerhouses quickly turn the tables, despite being greatly outnumbered, but the intended kidnappers piss off Grid by playing Kick the Dog on Ibaniel, the guy who was getting his gear upgraded at that moment, but they also ruined his work, that he had spent 20 hours on, gave a sarcastic fake apology and laughed. Say hello to the birth of the legend of "the psycho butcher!"

Live-Action TV

• Doctor Who: "Doomsday".
  Cyber-Leader: Daleks, be warned. You have declared war upon the Cybermen.
  Dalek Sec: This is not war... this is pest control!
  Cyber-Leader: We have five million Cybermen. How many are you?
  Dalek Sec: Four.
  Cyber-Leader: You would destroy the Cybermen with four Daleks?
  Dalek Sec: We would destroy the Cybermen with one Dalek! You are superior in only one respect.
  Cyber-Leader: What is that?
  Dalek Sec: You are better at dying!

  Taken up a notch when the Daleks notice the Doctor in the background

  Rose: Five million Cybermen, easy. One Doctor, now you're scared.

• Game of Thrones:
  • House Stark and their Tully allies can muster only about 30,000 men (due to early Tully defeats and reversals, they are not able to muster the full strength of the densely populated and prosperous Riverlands), but face upwards of 60,000 Lannister forces (many, many more when the Tyrells join the Lannister side). And despite almost always being badly outnumbered in individual battles, they have never once been defeated (except for that 2,000-men decoy force sent to confront Tywin in Season 1). Ultimately though, the strategic imbalance between Stark/Tully and Lannister/Tyrell means that the Starks can't win a protracted war outside of the North.
  • Although the force Lyanna Mormont can offer to combat Ramsay Snow is small, she claims that each of her warriors is worth ten mainlanders (evocative of House Mormont's sigil animal: a bear). Considering how badass Northern soldiers have generally been portrayed when fighting larger Southern forces, this is quite the Badass Boast. This isn't an idle boast, either. As explained in the novels, Bear Island is off the northwest coast of the North, so they're constantly fighting off not only wildling raids (in small fishing ships) but heavy raids from the Ironborn coming up from the south. Thus, they have very strong martial traditions — look at how tough Jeor was and Jorah still is — and they also had to train even their daughters to be warriors to survive while the men were out at sea in fishing ships.
  • The prequel series House of the Dragon has this twice over regarding the two sides of the "Dance of Dragons" Civil War, the Greens (those supporting Aegon II) and the Blacks (those supporting Rhaenyra).
    • The Blacks greatly outnumber the Greens in the number of dragons they possess, but they're all small potatoes compared to the massive beast that is Vhagar. This is why Daemon Targaryen takes it upon himself to try making the second biggest dragon in Westeros, the unclaimed Vermithor, tameable again.
    • The opposite is true of their regular armies: the Greens control the southern Reach and the Westerlands, the wealthiest and most populous core regions of Westeros - and this was before they absconded with the old royal treasury, which had built up over 80 years of peace and prosperity. On the other hand, these core regions haven't experienced any real warfare in living memory, so the Greens' troops are, well, green. By contrast, several of the Blacks' smaller armies are from fringe regions of Westeros that actually have seen combat - the Velaryon fleet has had years of fighting off pirates in the Stepstones under its belt, the Starks and North overall frequently deal with wildling and Ironborn raids, and the Arryns and Vale are often having to fend off raids from the hill tribes. Combined with near-total naval supremacy, the Blacks are able to quickly focus their smaller but more experienced forces where they need them.
• In Lexx, Mantrid's replicating drone swarm seems virtually unstoppable until the crew plugs 790's head into one of the drone arms. 790's vastly superior processor allows him to fight off numerous normal drones, and the crew quickly exploits this to turn Mantrid's own strategy against him by converting the drones they destroy into 790 drones. Mantrid ultimately counters this by attacking the crew head-on with his main force of drones, which so outnumbers the meager 790 force that Mantrid can have them surround and crush the 790 drones through sheer weight of numbers.

Newspaper Comics

• During the 2000s Time Skip in Funky Winkerbean, Funky took over management of the cast hangout Montoni's Pizza and opened several franchises. The other cast members including its former owner eventually took him aside and had him compare the pizza made to the recipe from when Montoni's was a single pizzeria to the current recipe, and apparently the former was superior to the latter.

Print Media

• Nintendo Power once had a debate on which was the better series, Super Mario Bros. or The Legend of Zelda. Zelda essentially won with the rebuttal of quality over quantity, arguing one Link to the Past was worth far more than multiple Mario Party games, despite the long time between Zelda games.

Video Games

• WarioWare:
  • While in their shared theme song, Mona Pizza boasts about how great their pizzas are, Pizza Dinosaur only boasts about how they're everywhere while acknowledging that their pizzas are terrible. In WarioWare: Twisted!, Pizza Dinosaur has its business being taken away by Mona Pizza, driving them to use more aggressive measures of competition.
  • The series in general is an inversion: a small team of people crank out games at a per-minute rate. Each game is about 4 to 8 seconds long, and hundreds of them pour out at a time. Wario has seen much success with this model, both in the stories for the games and in real-life sales of the video games in this series.
• Mass Effect:
  • In Mass Effect, Saren tries to cure the krogan Genophage so he'll have a krogan horde at his back. In Mass Effect 2 Warlord Okeer derides the idea of sheer numbers, calling it the mistake of an outsider. He, himself, has created Grunt, whom he considers a perfect krogan warrior.
  • The Spectres. According to Alliance's Intelligence there's less than 100 Spectres in the Galaxy but, taking Shepard as an example, every one of them is a One-Man Army capable of decimating armies.
• In the Army Men series, it's stated on one occasion that the Tan forces outnumber the Greens by as much as 50 to 1. Even if Sarge was exaggerating when he said this number, the Tans still seem to outnumber the Green troops by a good bit. However, the Greens will beat the Tans on the open battlefield almost every time, indicating that they put more emphasis on training their troops, unlike the tans who seem to function purely on the We Have Reserves mentality.
• Invoked in-universe by Donna in Final Fantasy X. She berates Yuna for choosing a large number of Guardians (AKA the rest of the cast) over one quality one. She even says "Quantity over Quality, what were you thinking?" (She herself only has her Lover Bartello). And in the end, it's averted because Yuna ends not only Beating Donna to Zanarkand, she end up saving the world for good. Donna even referred to Yuna's father High Summoner Braska, pointing out that he succeeded with only two Guardians. She's undercut when Bartello realizes that one of Yuna's Guardians is Auron, one of Braska's former Guardians. Yuna has quantity and quality on her side.
• In Red Dead Redemption II, the Van der Linde gang (Quality) vs. the O'Driscoll gang (Quantity). The Van der Lindes practically always eat the O'Driscolls alive every time they get into a gunfight because the Van der Lindes are a tight-knit crew of tough men and women who have ridden together for years and would die for each other; by contrast, the O'Driscolls are just a large but motley band of roving Irish-American gangsters, and Dutch reckons that Colm O'Driscoll himself doesn't even know the names of half the guys who ride with him.
• Destiny: Given that the series is set After the End, the human population (including the various forms of transhumanity and robots) is a fraction of what it once was, leaving them severely outnumbered by their enemies. Humanity is kept alive by the fact that they're defended by Guardians, whose Resurrective Immortality and ability to naturally wield Light makes them implacable, army-killing forces of nature, especially in numbers. The flip side to this, of course, is that every Guardian who is Killed Off for Real is a devastating loss, whereas many enemy factions are still going strong despite regularly losing thousands of troops to Guardians.
• Played with in Fallout: New Vegas as regards the Mojave Brotherhood of Steel. Veronica, a journeyman scribe and potential companion states that while an individual Brotherhood Paladin in Powered Armor and wielding Frickin' Laser Beams is individually superior to any raider, Legionnaire, or NCR trooper, there are just too few of them. She muses that while the Brotherhood has enough quality to win over the Legion’s quantity, there isn’t enough manpower to defeat the NCR. She hopes to rectify this by making the Brotherhood the kind of organization that people will want to join - with futile results at best.
  • Robert House ultimately can win by boosting not only the quality but also the quantity of his Securitron army. The Platinum Chip, the game’s MacGuffin boosts an individual Securitron’s weapon capability via an OS upgrade. But, if the chip is installed at the Securitron vault, it allows more Securitrons to be mass-produced.
• Generally the case in Mount & Blade. A small 50 to 90-man army of top-tier units like Nord Huscarls or Swadian Knights will make utter hay of much larger armies of several hundred men, with minimal casualties.
  • In Mount & Blade II: Bannerlord, the meta shifts to give sheer quantity more meaning. You can overrun an army of mighty knights and veteran legionaries with peasant rabble if you have enough of them, because the many troops can put the few troops in a Cycle of Hurting and heavy armour doesn't quite offer the same level of protection it did in the first game. However when you take ranged units into account, the picture shifts again as quality matters more; elite archers can shoot much further and more accurately than low-tier ones. Battanian Fian Champions, the ultimate noble archer troop in the game, are not only equipped with powerful longbows and are ridiculously skilled with them, but they also wield two-handed highlander swords and have decent armour too, so they can contend with melee quite well (though considering their price and rarity you should avoid that).
• In Fire Emblem, the number of units doesn't matter as much as their stats. In fact, in games that allow it, the optimal strategy is to "low-man": concentrate experience gains into a couple of characters who end up so strong they take little to no damage from the dozens of enemies the game throws at you and dispatch them in one round of combat (most notably Robin and Chrom in Awakening). Some games improve enemy quality and implement mechanics such as stat debuffing and true damage to prevent this juggernaut style of gameplay (such as Conquest), but they are few and far between.
• Red Alert 3: The Allies theoretically specialize in this, having more expensive units that can generally beat their equivalent in a one-to-one fight. In actual gameplay having lots of units is crucial (especially against the AI, which both plays better and cheats like there's no tomorrow.
  • In Uprising, the Imperial super-unit is the Giga-Fortress, the single most expensive unit in the game, and also the longest-ranged, able to attack Anti-Air while staying out of range.

Visual Novels

• Gilgamesh from Fate/stay night believes that this applies to humanity. Back when he ruled there were far fewer humans but his rule was a golden age and his kingdom was a glorious one full of advanced super-technology. His Evil Plan in Unlimited Blade Works is to use the Grail to thin out the human population so he can rebuild Babylon with the worthy survivors as his new subjects.

Western Animation

• In SpongeBob SquarePants, King Neptune challenges SpongeBob to a fry cooking competition where whoever cooks the most Krabby Patties wins, but he concedes to SpongeBob when he finds out that his mass-produced Patties are terrible while SpongeBob's singular Patty made with love is superior. Slow and steady wins the race, indeed.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic
  • When Sweet Apple Acres gets into a cider-making contest against some slick salesponies and their Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000. This trope is double subverted because the machine is shown to make good cider, but when the Apple family, along with the Mane Six, start pulling ahead, the sales ponies turn up the power and turn off the quality control, which lets them churn out far more barrels of cider, but it's the kind nopony wants to drink.
  • In "Canterlot Boutique", Rarity competes against Sassy Saddles. Saddles is more concerned with running a successful business and favoring heavy product specialization and assembly line-type manufacture. Rarity, on the other hand prefers to make each dress on an individual basis and to put love and creativity into each. Ultimately, the episode sides with Rarity with the implication that Sassy Saddles' way caused other stores to crash and burn.
• An episode of Baby Looney Tunes involves the babies raising money for a volleyball net. When they get five dollars, Granny takes Bugs to the toy store so he can buy a net for five dollars. Bugs is tempted to buy several toys that cost one dollar each. The cheap toys easily break. Later, Bugs sells his toy rocket ship and manages to buy another net.

Real Life

• The ancient Spartans were an example of this. The only people allowed to join the Spartan military, still remembered today for being the most hardcore fighting force ever assembled, were males of full Spartan citizenship. With the borderline-insane amounts of training they had to endure from a young age, they were raised from early childhood for the sole purpose of becoming a member of Greece's (and probably history's) most feared and respected military force. While this approach did produce incredible soldiers, the strict entry criteria (most citizens of Sparta were not actually full spartans, such as the Helots) meant that their army was, while still not small, not really large by the standards of the time either. This would end up working against Sparta in the long run, though; however incredible each individual soldier was, they couldn't be in two places at once. Furthermore, this training took a long time. Any losses the Spartans took were effectively irreplaceable for a generation. Attrition was a key factor in Sparta's military decline and eventual downfall.
• Overall military philosophy which emerged from World War I can be seen as this. Well-trained and well-equipped armies fielding artillery, engineers, trucks, trains, and infantry forces capable of working together to plan and execute operations were the way of the future. Armies that could not coordinate those various combat and support arms could neither attack nor defend, and obviously had no future.
• World War II:
  • Unsurprisingly, given just how massive the armies were, the war as a whole played out in favour of quantity. More specifically, this was true of artillery. When the Soviets and Western Allies began to churn out massive amounts of artillery, (infantry) mortars, and ammunition in 1942 the Germans simply couldn't keep up. The sheer volume of Allied firepower was such that the Germans couldn't prevent them from suppressing the bulk of German tactical defenses in a prepared attack. The superior quality of the German artillerymen and infantry who avoided or were able to work through the bombardments wasn't enough to compensate for the devastating effects of the bombardment, especially given their inability to respond with huge bombardments of their own (caused by their relative shortages of artillery and ammunition). This is why ex-Wehrmacht personnel gave the US Army the (seemingly obvious) suggestion that the best way of stopping a tactical attack by Soviet forces was through heavy artillery fire.
  • Again, quantity in armor. Truck-towed artillery may have been critical to suppressing enemy tactical defenses, but self-propelled artillery (including tanks) was very helpful in reducing infantry losses when actually breaking through and beyond them into the open country. Tanks were also key to fighting in the open country itself, where the fast pace of the fighting meant there were delays when bringing truck-towed artillery to bear on the enemy - making tanks the main anti-tank weapon for numerous short but critical windows. Superior numbers of Soviet T-34 and Allied M4 Sherman tanks repeatedly overran smaller numbers of generally superior German tanks in mobile warfare, though the T-34 was actually slightly superior to German Panzer-IV (which became the most common German tank in 1943) and all the Germans' previous 'primary' tanks. There's even a case for arguing that the second-most common German tank, the Panther of 1943-45, was still inferior to the upgraded T-34/85 (the main Soviet tank of 1944-45). The Germans did not, it must be added, help their case when in 1943-44 they repeatedly sent lone panzer divisions (100 tanks) against entire Soviet Tank Armies (400+ tanks) in the mistaken belief that they were just as weak as they had been in previous years (100-200 tanks). This actually worked a couple of times, but always resulted in near-total German tank losses.
  • Inverted, in that the Panther tanks were actually notoriously low quality. Panther tanks featured incredibly thin side armor, a shell that was useless for anti-infantry work, and a transmission so incredibly shoddy that most would break down in under 150 miles. Worse still, the team-based assembly crews of the Germans meant that no two Panthers were alike; unlike the standardized Sherman and T-34 tanks, you couldn't just get repair parts sent in, or scavenge them from broken-down tanks. If something broke, its replacement had to be machined to fit. A lot of trouble with the Panther was that it was the first of the post-World War 2 tanks that appeared a few years earlier than its equivalents and designed only to defeat its contemporaries. It was certainly larger and more advanced in various features. Its armor layout was actually superior since heavy front armor with fairly thin side armor provided both good protection and saved weight, provided that the crew was sufficiently skilled (It is very difficult to get a good shot at a tank from the side from a distance, provided that the crew is aware of the surroundings and can maneuver the tank accordingly.) and became the standard feature of many 1950s and 60s tanks. But its margin of superiority over Sherman and T-34 was slim at first and could be largely overcome with few upgrades. In the hands of untrained crews (especially in the August 1944 phase of Operation Bagration in Poland), the Panther became a deathtrap. Compared to its true equivalents — the Pershing/Patton, the Centurion, and the T-44/54/55 — the Panther was a joke.
  • After being maligned for much of the 20th century, a number 21st Century military historians have come around to suggest that the M4 Sherman actually was better quality than any of the German or Russian tanks. Its 'hard' stats: Armor, maneuverability, and firepower were as good or better than any tank in 1942, and still good enough in 1944-45. With its 'soft' stats (ease of repair, time between necessary maintenance, standardized parts, crew comfort, etc) putting it ahead of the T-34 and Panther. And thus it still stands that "good enough" Quality in Quantity was better.
  • This can be seen in the air as well. Fighter aircraft are becoming increasingly more sophisticated and requiring more time to engineer and manufacture. Like tank crews, training fighter pilots is a lengthy, demanding, and expensive process.
  • One of the horrifying realizations for the Japanese Airforce during WW2 was this; the Kamikaze attacks they conducted were having diminished success later into the war because while the Japanese have been effectively tossing their airmen at the enemy by the bucket loads, the Allies were fending them off and learning new strategies on how to counter them. Near the end of it, the majority of Kamikaze pilots were young men barely out of basic training piloting what were essentially slapdashed planes made from spare parts, while the Allied airforce against them were veterans of the entire war armed with the most advanced interceptors of their time. Even those planes that managed to evade Allied fighters had to contend with ships firing proximity-fused exploding shells (that would detonate just when they were near a target, without needing to actually hit it) from radar-directed guns. They also realized that, at this point, very soon they wouldn't even have the numerical advantage.
  • Overall, the US air forces preferred a hybrid of the two. In contrast to Japan (which had very few natural talents and a lot of newbies), the Americans would ship the pilots who demonstrated the greatest skill back to the States to serve as trainers. As a result, they had a number of solid, but not outstanding pilots who could nonetheless outnumber the enemy aces and outfly the cannon fodder.
  • Overall the Axis Powers attempted this approach in World War 2. Germany and Japan didn't have the industrial capacity to beat the Soviets and Americans at their own numbers game, and in any case producing more vehicles would have only exacerbated their increasing shortages of manpower and fuel. As such, their only hope was to inflict enough casualties with as few equipment to force their opponents into capitulating. However, the poor logistics and lack of experienced crew meant that German tanks and Japanese warships could never perform to their true potential. In other words, the quality of Axis equipment was not significant enough to overcome the quantity deficiency.
• The 1991 Gulf War produced one of the most extreme examples favorable to quality. On one side you had Saddam Hussein and his more than 1 million strong Iraqi military, the fourth largest in the world at that time. On the other, you had the U.S.-led Coalition which fielded about half that number, some 500,000 troops. One would think Saddam had a big advantage with a 2-1 numerical superiority. But as anyone familiar with history knows, Saddam was on the receiving end of one of the most epic Curb-Stomp Battle defeats in recent history as the Iraqis took 25,000 casualties while the Coalition only suffered about 230. Saddam's army may have been big but they were pitifully incompetent, to the point that some armored units wouldn't even react to fire they took from their flanks. Even their supposedly "elite" forces like the Republican Guard were obliterated rather easily. In contrast, the Coalition forces (especially the Americans) were far better trained and had access to the latest weapons, vehicles, etc. with the latest technologies such as GPS (great at navigating through the desert) and precision-guided bombs dropped from stealth aircraft (great at taking out enemy command structures and power plants without carpet-bombing whole sections of a city). Thus illustrating an important but often forgotten lesson: You can raise a giant army, but it won't do any good if they don't know what they're doing.
• An even stronger example is the Feb 7, 2018 Battle of Khasham. A US Special forces platoon of 40, aided by drones and F-22 air support, was attacked by over 600 Syrian regulars and Russian mercenaries. The attackers were slaughtered with over 400 dead without a single casualty on the US side.
• The American Revolutionary War gives a good example. American riflemen were not only vastly fewer in number than their British soldiers, but couldn't fire nearly as fast as their musket-wielding foes thanks to how difficult it is to reload a muzzle-loaded rifle. However, the shots they did have were far more accurate than anything the British army was willing to pay for. The result is that American riflemen often were able to kill critical personal or commanders while the retaliating fire was ineffective.
  • Really, this is the point of a sniper. A sniper and a spotter are typically the most trained and best-equipped combatants in a scenario, and a good sniper can very easily dismantle an enemy's command structure given enough time.
• The 1982 Falklands war can be seen in a similar light, and with a similar result. On one hand, the British actually were not at a numerical disadvantage in any way. However, there were moments where individual battles on the ground had British units come face to face with an Argentine force that was larger, and win. The Battle of Goose Green in particular had a British force attack a fortified Argentine garrison that had them outnumbered 3-1. It was a Curb-Stomp Battle for the Brits because while the Argentines were mostly conscripts who were poorly trained, the Brits had one of the best trained and most powerful military forces on Earth.
• On the Korean peninsula, North Korea has the current fourth largest army in the world, while South Korea and their U.S. allies have about half that number. The South and America have much better training and equipment, and would seem to be pretty confident about their chances in a war, however so far it hasn't been tested yet. And let's all hope it never has to be. And it needs to be noted that things would get considerably more dicey should China ever enter a second war in Korea as they did with the first. In the Korean War, the United Nations coalition troops actually were on the verge of victory, having captured Pyongyang, the North's capital. Then China sent a gigantic horde of troops to push the allies back. In many battles, Chinese forces would sometimes suffer ten times the number of UN casualties, even in battles they won. However, because they were so numerous, they successfully pushed the U.N. forces back across the original North/South border. However, even then, China's "quantity" type strategy took it only so far as the U.N. was able to hold them at the border. The result was ultimately a stalemate. Today, however, China is trying to increase the quality of its troops while still having access to the world's largest population as a recruitment pool. Again, let's hope we never see what would happen in such a war.
• The Battle of Cannae:
  • The forces of Hannibal were outnumbered by the Roman legions, by almost 2 to 1. Hannibal instead decided to use greater tactics against the numerical advantage. Due to the fact that Roman command rotated when two consuls (their supreme commanders) were present, Hannibal took advantage of that cycle and drew in the Roman legions on the day the hotheaded consul took charge (who thought his massive legions were enough to simply steamroll over Hannibal). Hannibal had placed his weakest troops in the center of his own formation (an inverted crescent), while his strongest troops on the edges. The Roman Consul took this as an opportunity to route the center of Hannibal's forces and cut the latter's army in two, before routing them. Instead, Hannibal had placed himself within the center formation, resulting in them not being completely curb-stomped, but simply moving back. His outer forces did not budge however and instead closed in the right-side crescent formation. His own cavalry then later closed what little gap there was left, and thus Hannibals much smaller army was now able to butcher the Romans at their leisure (some accounts describe that the space was so tight between the Romans that many of them could not even raise a sword or shield to defend themselves). Cannae would be one of the first times in history that a larger army was defeated by a smaller one.
  • Subverted by a small but crucial part of the armies: Hannibal's cavalry, including the elite Numidians, outnumbered their Roman counterparts (10,000 vs. 6,400), with the victory of the Numidians being crucial to the triumph. While the Numidians were high quality too (the best light cavalry of their time), Roman cavalry was equally good (in the Pyrrhic War they had repeatedly crushed Pyrrhus' Thessalians, until then considered the best heavy cavalry of the world), and only the combination of numerical superiority alongside Hannibal's instructions to avoid melee allowed them the quick defeat of the Roman cavalry that made the overall victory possible.
  • Later played straight when the Romans conquered Numidia: still proud of their performance under Hannibal first and Scipio later in the Second Punic War and forgetting they had switched sides and were even a unified kingdom because Scipio had crushed the Numidians allied with Carthage, they thought they could win with ease, only to find out that even in its last days the outnumbered Roman cavalry could defeat the Numidians whenever the latter let the former close into melee range (something that actually did happen multiple times).
• The idea of Capital Ships was central to this in naval warfare for a very long time. Due to being able to mount heavier armor and armament, a heavier warship (such as a Battleship) would always be at an advantage against an equal tonnage of smaller ships (such as cruisers). The introduction of newer weapons such as self-propelled torpedos, submarines, airplanes, and finally guided missiles caused the balance to change in favor of whoever could shoot the other first.
  • Peacetime navies generally favor this, mostly because quantity is generally more expensive maintenance-wise. For example, a single carrier capable of carrying sixty aircraft will use less fuel, cost less, and generally require less maintenance than three carriers that can carry twenty aircraft. And that's not even factoring in that building plans trend toward quantity tend to skimp on build quality which leads to a lot of problems down the road.
• Bruce Lee on dangerous martial arts opponents: "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
• This trope was Nintendo's whole argument during their dominance in the '80s and early '90s before they changed their policies after being accused of monopolistic practices with their licensing agreements. The original agreement was that licensees could only make up to five games a year; the reasoning behind the decision was that it was better for the developers to focus on creating a few smash hits than to flood the market by churning out mediocre games, as was the case with Atari before the crash. Some companies with a good track record for quality would make up bogus development houses to go above the five-per-year limit, like Konami did when they made up the Ultra Games label; since these games tended to sell very well, Nintendo would let this slide.
• Ninja lived by this trope. The individual ninja was light, mobile and a master of technology for their time. They would never win a ten-to-one fight, but they had many advantages in a one-on-one. They made the best spies because the focused on gathering as much information as possible and planning for months or even years in advanced, and they were masters of survival in the untamed wilds of feudal Japan.
• During the Vietnam War the United States instituted Project 100,000, a controversial program to recruit soldiers with mental or physical disabilities. While the program added over 300,000 men to the armed forces, the results were generally disastrous. Units with these new recruits suffered disproportionately more casualties and less morale, and the lowered standards are even suspected to have contributed to subsequent US war crimes such as the My Lai massacre. In the end the program caused increased public opposition to the war and was canceled in 1971.
• In the Early 18th Century this was the principle behind the Swedish Caroleans. Due to the fact that their population was smaller than their neighbours, Poland-Lithuania and Russia, they focused on having a small but very well trained army which aimed to break an enemy's line before their enemy could bring their full forces to bare. They successfully used this doctrine to win the Battles of Narva, Kliszow and Fraustadt in The Great Northern War.
• From a culinary standpoint, Chocolate can be seen this way. Too much chocolate can get messy and sickly to eat. Which is why the best Chocolatiers in the world, work to perfect a limited batch of refined chocolate. Since it's a very customizable and adaptable treat, you'll find the chocolates with rarer ingredients and stocks, more expensive than commonly made bars. On the quantity side, cheaper mass-produced chocolate often has to substitute cocoa butter with carnauba wax to make the candy self-stable and less prone to melting, and then bump up the sugar content to compensate for the loss of flavor.
• This is a natural selection among Scorpions. When it comes to these creatures, it's the smaller species of scorpions that have the most potent venom. This is because, smaller scorpions lack the brute, crushing strength of their larger members. Larger scorpions such as the Emperor Scorpion, can merely use their enlarged pincers to catch and shred their prey, using their stinger just for a final blow. Scorpions that dwarf them, have to rely on their patience, waiting for the venom they injected to do the work.

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