Suspiciously Small Army

"Piece out our imperfections with your thoughts:

Into a thousand parts divide one man,

And make imaginary puissance;"

- William Shakespeares Henry V, Lampshading this trope and at the same time making it Older Than Steam.

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.

Comic Books

 * Transformers does this in a big way. Even when robots are fighting for the fate of the universe, or the very fabric of space and time, it's rare to see more than a few dozen fighters involved in any battle.
 * Then again they're giant robots.

Film

 * The Big Red One rarely had more than a half-dozen men on screen at any one time.
 * The epic biographical film Patton, featuring some of the fulcrum battles of America's campaign in Europe, was filmed with about a dozen tanks (M-60 Pattons, at that) and the same two Heinkel bombers over and over again.
 * In Alatriste, the Spanish defeat at Rocroi is reduced to a pitiful skirmish with barely a couple dozen soldiers on each side.

Live Action TV

 * In the Sharpe series, the units involved in the battles tend to be rather small. Works fine when depicting small-unit actions in Spain, breaks down miserably when trying to depict the battle of Waterloo.
 * The Romulan's invasion force in Star Trek TNG. You can imagine the planning meeting - "So that's invading Vulcan, occupying the planet and fending off a probable Federation counter attack. Two thousand men should be plenty"
 * The producers of Game of Thrones obviously didn't have enough money to film a mass battle scene of any kind, and barely had enough actors to let the Lannister camp look somewhat occupied. The audience does not get to see much of the first season's "huge battle," because the perspective character is knocked unconcious almost immediately. In the books, he was concious, and the narration describes the battle in great detail - but a novelist doesn't need to hire actors.
 * It's even more noticeable with the Dothraki horde of a dozen... um "40,000" Dothraki, to the point that one has to assume the most important members of it ride some considerable distance away from the rest.
 * George Martin even lampshades in his blog, since he is writing the script for the episode depicting the Battle of Blackwater. He complains about the author making the battle too large a scale than the budget available.
 * One episode of Xena: Warrior Princess features the Roman invasion of Britain (well a bit of New Zealand that slightly resembles Britain) by an army that struggles to make it into double figures.

Theatre

 * Zeroth Law: Lampshaded in The Prologue to Shakespeare's Henry V in the page quote.

Video Games

 * Despite being one of the most realistic representations of battlefield tactics in the gaming industry, Total War does this, at least in the earlier games. A units standard size in Rome is between 40 and 60 men, and even at the huge unit size of 240 men, armies can't exceed 4,800 men. The actual Roman army, meanwhile, could deploy many tens of thousands of soldiers in single battles. Naturally this is due to graphical limitations, a 10,000-man army would break all but the most advanced computers. Every faction bringing that many or more to the field would make the game impossible to run.
 * Rome used 80-man units ("centuries") in real life, and 4,800 men is the low-end size of a Roman legion. Of course, most major battles in Roman history involved several; for instance, Julius Caesar commanded twelve legions at the battle of Alesia (which was an under-powered force for the task). At its height the army contained around fifty legions, plus at least as many auxiliaries and cavalry units, but obviously never all deployed at once.
 * The upcoming Shogun 2, apparently, is going to make this much more realistic for Japanese feudal armies.
 * To be exact, the new engine can handle up to 56,000 units on screen at any one time, while looking jaw-droppingly beautiful at the same time.
 * The Advance Wars series is very guilty of this. No more than 50 units under your control ever; note, however, that every unit in the Advance Wars games, except for Megatanks/Wartanks, is a literal unit composed of no fewer than 10 of whatever you're specifically talking about.
 * Fire Emblem takes this Up to Eleven. The Arbitrary Headcount Limit is, on a huge map, around 20 people.
 * Averted in 7 (where outside of the prologue and one battle, both against a single province in a confederation (that even with all members united, is one of the weakest countries in the world militarily), you never control or fight an “army,” just a band of soldiers on an expedition while clashing with a cult and and an assassin league.) Justified in 9 & 10 (the player is said to be controlling a vanguard when the plot has the player's units allied with an army.) 4, while not having a headcap, is the most Egregious because of its map size, with single units taking entire regions.
 * Age of Wonders has a maximum of nine units per hex, and each unit on the battle screen is merely 1 person. This leads to battles over large cities being fought between armies of around 20-30 people.
 * In the original Starcraft, Terran campaign mission 9, Tassadar's entire Protoss fleet apparently consists of a couple of bases with dozens of zealots and dragoons.
 * Adressing the huge numbers of units you can control in StarCraft, Warcraft 3 introduced a maximum number of units you can build that is very low compared to other similar games at the time. You can only supply a maximum of 90 food units (100 in the expansion) for your army, and the most basic combat unit takes up 2 food units and every worker 1. More advanced units can even take up as much as 5 or 7 food units. Combined with the fact that larger armies reduce the amount of gold coming from your mines, this encourages a much faster style of playing the game instead of holing up in your base until you have a massive army. At the same time, the purge of Stratholm and the siege of Dalaran are done by only 20-something attackers. This is at least partially intentional, as the developers wanted players to focus more on micromanaging individual fighters than on guiding large forces.
 * Earlier builds of the game, which were much more RPG than the final game was, had even smaller forces.
 * Star Wars Battlefront 2. Other than yourself, every battle you participate in is fought with just 16 troops a side! Somehow, this is still enough to make the battles feel dangerous and full of hundreds of soldiers. Might have something to do with AIs respawning and you dying every 10 seconds.
 * Averted somewhat in XL mode, at least in comparison to the other game modes. There are more units in XL- 64 units a side.
 * Castles II: Siege & Conquest did this at the presentation level, as “zooming” in or out would use the exact same scenery and troop graphics, but portray clustered soldiers and large background features as single troops and more compact landscape.
 *  ~Defense of the Ancients: All-Stars~  with its three lanes of five melee mooks and one ranged mook each, which could increase to two ranged mooks and one siege unit.
 * In Patapon 1 and 2, the eye count of a patapon army is below 20. In Patapon 3, the army is reduced to 4 warriors and a flag carrier.
 * This is averted somewhat in Civilization V, in which each infantry unit consists of several individuals. However, the one-unit-per-hex limitation still results in large battles featuring a few dozen soldiers at most.
 * In Makai Kingdom, Zetta's plan to rebuild his powerbase requires him to conquer several entire Netherworlds, using his army of mooks since he can't fight on his own. You can only have eight characters in play on any given map, and you're unlikely to have more than a few dozen in total. Yes, they may be four-digit levels and extremely powerful with proper work (fifth-tier infantry are titled "One man army" and "One woman army" respectively) but eight people make for a very restrained army.
 * Shattered Union has player reunite USA with max of 42 units.
 * They are, however, explicitly battalions and divisions of units represented by a single one on the screen. 42 battalions to a combat front isn't that bad, especially since you'd likely be working with relatively low budgets.
 * In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the PC can recruit soldiers to hold of an invading daedric horde that is about to burrow through from Oblivion and destroy a city. If you do all the necessary sidequests, you wind up with about a dozen mediocre soldiers to fight an equivalent number of monsters.
 * In Final Fantasy Tactics, Ramza's crew is described occasionally as an army. There's at most 20-ish people in it, and only five of them are ever fighting at a given time. The developers at least explain this away by having the big war and its battles take place away from Ramza's adventures.
 * Being the direct predecessor, Tactics Ogre commits the same sin, though at least allows for twice as many units to be deployed. Still it presents its tiny skirmishes of two dozen soldiers as being key dramatic battles in a massive war.
 * Ogre Battle has a limit of 100 individuals in the entire revolutionary army (which is trying to capitulate a continet-wide empire), and no more than ten units of five troops on the field at any given time. Major battles deciding the fates of entire provinces take place between two five-soldier units, and end when the enemy leader dies.
 * Ace of Spades also suffers from this quite badly on some of the larger maps, including the default semi-randomly generated one that's supplied with the game. A 64-player server limit is said to be in the works, however.
 * Brothers in Arms: Re-enacts Cole's charge from the D-Day campaign with 1 Colonel, 1 Sergeant and 6 Paratroopers. In real life the position they had to attack was assaulted with 200 men.
 * Armed Assault 2 averts this trope to an extent, allowing you to simulate battalion-sized meeting engagements between Cold War-era armies... if your PC to the point of nearly melting your motherboard. The end results, however are well worth it.