| abstract | - Armies in video games and animation in general don't just get the size of their individual soldiers wrong. Due to gameplay and graphical limitations, particularly graphical limitations, armies tend to be a lot smaller than they would have been in real life. An army that would have numbered in the tens of thousands will number a few hundred or at most a thousand men, and that's for a very big battle. Its worth noting that the notion of a 1:1 correspondence between army size and depiction is something of an innovation in itself and represents a considerable advancement in graphical technology. (The single classic wargame counter represents a unit that might have any number of men in it.) In Tabletop Games involving miniatures, one miniature is often a "stand-in" for a whole bunch of guys. The same factor often contributes to computer games, with one guy or a small group of guys standing in for a much larger force, as the trope quote will indicate. It is not just animated media that fall victim to this trope. You think it's expensive making a graphical engine that can run a battle of 10,000 people? Try paying 10,000 actors. As a result, film and TV can fall victim to this as well. Thanks to CGI technology, this trope is considerably less frequent. See also: Units Not to Scale, Oddly Small Organization. Contrast Million Mook March. Examples of Suspiciously Small Army include:
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