Zerg Rush/Video Games

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Examples of Zerg Rushes in Video Games include:

  • Named for the Zerg in StarCraft, whose main tactic is pretty much this in a nutshell -- overwhelming numbers of cheap, disposable troops. (Memetic Mutation follows usage of this term with "Kekeke", the Korean equivalent of "hahaha.") Though as mentioned above, the meaning of the name in StarCraft multiplayer is rather different than the above description. In single player, the trope holds true for the Zerg.
    • The classic Zerg rush refers to using the zerg's advantage in the early game of being able to quickly churn out weak units (e.g zerglings) to sack the enemy's base before they can set up their slower-to-build but more powerful units. Of course, the numbers will be few, thus rendering the trope null and void in this case, but it is where the term originated.
  • Strangely enough, in StarCraft II the Terran (with their dual build queue option) and Protoss (with their warp-in ability) can both pull this off better then the rather boom-y zerg.
    • In Starcraft parlance, a "rush" involves getting a particular unit as quickly as possible and attacking with it before the enemy could hope to have a counter. This applies even if the unit in question is a late-game unit. For example, a Terran player can do a Banshee rush (essentially helicopter gunships that have a researchable cloaking upgrade), and the Protoss can Void Ray Rush (airships that can Beam Spam). Both were possible tactics against Protoss and especially Zerg players, who often don't have enough early-game anti-air to stop such an attack unless they see it coming and prepare specifically for that (leaving them open to a more conventional ground attack).
    • In a rather hilarious bit of irony, the Zerg in SC2 are most effective when employing the opposite of the Zerg Rush in the early game. Instead of churning out a lot of zerglings early on, they instead constantly build Worker Unit drones far faster than the other races can, build a huge economic advantage, then Zerg Rush (Except at that point, it's usually just called a push or an attack). In fact, in pro-level play, it is up to the other races to hamper the Zerg early on to prevent them from "droning" and running away with an economic lead.
  • This is the favorite strategy of the enemies in Diablo 2 (even for the bigger guys). Think about it: You and up to 7 other guys, up against hundreds of demons. It especially gets nuts when you're up against those bug things, that spawn smaller bug things, from Act 2. There are some structures that spawn enemies, which look like something out of the Zerg Faction. I guess Blizzard LOVES this trope.
  • In World of Tanks a Zerg Rush is both a viable strategy and a suicide attempt. Either the enemy will be overwhelmed, or your team will be shredded as the entrenched tanks fire, sometimes blowing off a track, usually an instant death for the imobalized tank.
  • This is the AI's strategy in any Tower Defense game, in which the player's goal is to prevent their base from being overwhelmed by sheer weight of numbers.
  • In Warcraft 2: The Tides of Darkness, it was a common (and much cursed) strategy of the Orcs to use a "Grunt Rush" to win battles -- the father of the Zerg Rush. (Unlike Starcraft, you started with only 1 worker and no buildings. The thought was to build a Town Hall with the gold the game started you with to get an economy going. Some players, however, build a barracks instead and used whatever gold left to make basic fighting units and go attack the enemy, who would be lucky to even have a barracks started, much less have any units to defend with.)
    • Of course, this could only work on High or Medium resources. Those of us that prefer Low (where you only had enough for the town hall and first farm) had little worries of this sort of all-in. Though, more befitting the trope was producing footmen/grunts heavily out of three barracks and hitting your opponent when they were just starting to get knights/ogres, overwhelming them with the weaker infantry.
  • In Warcraft 3, the Undead have an exploding Zerg Rush. This is because Necromancers casting "Raise Dead" raise two skeletons from every corpse - so if you send in a rush of ghouls backed up by a couple of Necromancers set to auto-cast "Raise Dead" the resultant explosion of skeletons from friendly and enemy corpses alike can be very destructive.
    • Before the patch, some Alliance players built a town hall in front of the enemy town, and then swarm the enemy with an endless stream of militia.
  • Kingdom Hearts has this with The Heartless. The section in the second game where you have to fight off one thousand Mooks springs to mind.
  • Most side-scrolling Beat Em Ups have this, with the player character facing off against hundreds of faceless, weak Mooks who are more than capable of wearing you down over time.
  • Dynasty Warriors. Any enemy faction against the player character.
  • Zerg Rushing is fairly common in Nintendo Wars, including the classic "Mech Rush" tactic and its infantry-and-artillery variant in the AW2 and AW:DS era. Even in situations where foot soldiers are ineffective, it is usually wise to deploy multiple cheap units rather than fewer, stronger ones (copters instead of bombers is a prime example).
    • Some COs have specializations that seem to have been designed with this trope in mind. Colin of the original Advance Wars series is the epitome of it, since his troops are weaker but cheaper. Hachi, Sasha, and Sensei are also particularly capable of using sheer numbers to overwhelm. Andy's supports this indirectly, as his repairs ability help all units a set amount, being more effective when you go for numbers over strength.
    • This troper has confirmed that infantry rushes are effective, if rather inelegant: testing whether or not Scratch Damage is employed in AW2, I created a map with 50 infantry versus 1 neotank, and set Andy as both COs, with powers off (so that every unit's attack and defense is its exact baseline stat). It took 8 turns to destroy the neotank, and it only killed 7 infantry units. (In subsequent tests, it took 8 turns for Colin to destroy the neotank with Max as its CO, and Colin lost 9 infantry; with Sami vs Sami, it took six turns and only 3 infantry were destroyed.)
  • For most Fire Emblem games, this is a favored tactic of the AI opponents; they'll typically field armies that are anywhere between twice to four times the size of your party and, unless they're on the defensive, will send units to attack you in large numbers. This is offset somewhat by the player units having better stats, better equipment and the benefit of support relationships, so a properly-leveled party will take little/no damage from the resulting Rush. Hard/Maniac Modes, however...
  • The Russians in Age of Empires III. Their light infantry is weak and has low HP, but they're built by tens and are the cheapest units in the game.
    • You can rush with Hittite elephants in |Age of Empires I. Much like real elephants they're hard to get rushing but man, once they start it's hard to get them to stop.
      • The Yamato cavalry rush was another staple of the original game.
      • Plus the late-game Shang villager horde, involving villager-only upgrades that turned them into passable fighting units. When you consider that the Shang had the cheapest villagers in the game...
      • In the same game, once the enemy AI runs out of military units, they still have all their Villagers out and about. Unless you've got to killing them, too, or even if you have, and if you attack a critical structure, such as their Town Center, they will often sic every Villager on you. At once.
    • For a dramatic demonstration of this, play AoE2 with the "aegis" cheat activated. That cheat allows all players to create buildings and units instantly, but may also make the game damn near impossible to win as your opponents will inevitably send an endless stream of constantly-replenishing units at you.
      • Also, the dominant strategy in AoE2 is to flood out weak and cheap second tier units faster than the enemy, before gradually moving onto stronger units (the "flush").
    • For whatever reason, Anti-Zerg Rushing Scrubs are particularly common in the AoE community. Many games are played with a house rule that neither side can attack for some fixed length of time, sometimes ranging up to 45 minutes. It was so popular in the expansion "treaty" mode was introduced, so neither side could attack each other for 10, 20, 30, or 40 minutes depending on what is selected.
  • Overlord, definitely. Your "Minions" are extremely expendable, and quite often, the easiest way to handle any given encounter, is to just keep throwing minions at it 'till it breaks. Sure, there are probably more elegant ways to do it, but...
  • Alliance of Valiant Arms has the "infection" and "battlegear begins" game modes, where the players have to fight off armies of zombies and killer robots, both of which use these tactics to try to overwhelm the players.
  • Final Fantasy XI has this in spades... mostly on the part of the players. Over the years, a common phrase for beating endgame monsters is to "Throw Rangers/Black Mages/Summoners/Melees/Samurai/Dark Knights at it." Hell, the strategy is named Zerging.
    • Many a player can tell a story about the time they range-attacked a weak monster on the other side of an impassable obstacle, only to see the monster go charging off in some random direction... only to appear fifteen minutes later, having finally navigated the zone to find the player, and having alerted all its friends that it met along the way. Twenty floppy little bunny rabbits equals quick death.
    • One of the missions in the Crystalline Prophecy expansion involves 30 mandragoras attacking you in waves of about 5 or 6 each. They're comically weak and take an enhanced amount of damage, so it's part zerg rush and part whack-a-mole as the mandragoras die in one hit each.
      • However, if you leave these enemies alone long enough they can Zerg Rush you by performing a move that takes nearly all of their HP and turns it into about 300ish damage. This attack can be used by the entire crowd in quick succession if you let them, which results in a near-instant and humiliating death on the player's part.
      • The mini-expansion which came out after Crystalline Prophecy, A Moogle Kupo d'Etat, features another such battle where a swarm of Cardians attack the player. They are exceptionally weak, much like the previous expansion's mandragoras, until you realize that half of the crowd attacking you are in the middle of casting some of the most powerful spells in the game.
  • As fitting for a Blizzard game, World of Warcraft also has the zerg rush as an encounter in the Zul'Farrak instance.
    • Many instances feature large packs of weak enemies that have to be killed by area of effect-attacks or they simply owerwhelm the players. Particularly notable are the ones like the boss encounter in Zul'Farrak where the enemies just spawn when an event is triggered and immdediately attack the players.
    • Also, at the Battlegrounds (side vs side PvP areas), zerging (which is called just that, even by people who use it) is usually the most common tactic for defeating the enemy. Suggesting anything more complicated will either get you ignored or insulted. However, the final bosses of Alterac Valley are designed so that zerging them will only result in lots of unnecessary deaths.
      • Don't tell this completely obvious point to players in the Alterac Valley however. Zerg teh 0lny w@y 2 win!1!
        • In the old PVP Rank Grind days, skilled, rank-minded presets or premades - groups of players all queueing together and acting as a team, instead of the random team the game's queueing system throws you together with - often had multiple, pre-planned strategies for each map, in case the enemy team resorted to Zerg. Zerg in WoW PVP is very powerful - it's jsut a cloud of red names haphazardly smashing everything in sight - but very, very stupid. It often ends up with the entire enemy team moving around at once - suicidal to attack directly, but none of these maps rely on merely killing opponents to win, capture of critical points (like flags or towers) are always required. Thus, when facing a Zerg, the appropriate response is to disperse, not ever attack it head-on, and just get behind it, re-capping everything they leave behind. The end result is a huge, dangerous and yet helpless mass of players constantly losing everything they've just gained as soon as they move on to the next point, losing the game in spite of the seemingly overwhelming display of force.
    • This type of instance event is usually called a "gauntlet" where waves of enemies will attack the party, with little to no downtime between waves, followed immediately by a powerful boss. A couple of notable gauntlets in the latest expansion include: The Violet Hold which is nothing more than 3 gauntlets, one after the other; Gothik the Harvester in Naxxramas, where the waves of enemies you must defeat before you can fight Gothik return in waves of undead after you kill them.
      • The "wave boss" of Halls of Stone follows this pattern for the most part, but has no final boss. Instead, the waves consist of 2-3 elites, which can Charge past you instantly into the room you're protecting. Unlike Violet Hold or the gauntlet from Culling of Stratholme, waves are on a set timer, which is shorter than most geared-at-level parties can kill them. Also, the room you're protecting is firing lasers at you from behind. This is considered one of the most challenging encounters in the Heroic tier, especially when running with a tank without a Zone of Threat capability.
    • The infamous Leeroy Jenkins incident. The dragon eggs in the particular room must be touched to hatch initially, but once they start hatching it usually results in a chain reaction which leads to entirely too many dragon hatchlings all heading towards the party at once....
    • On the Alliance there's the (in)famous Hogger raids. Forty level ones constantly rushing towards perhaps the lowest level elite in the game (level 11) results in some hilarious moments. The Horde does the same with Gamon, though he's not elite.
      • As of the Cataclysm, Gamon is a Level 85 elite who can easily kill a player with a stern glare if the player is not of the highest level. During the run-up to the 3rd expansion, you could see him being Zerg Rushed by dozens of players in an attempt to defeat him. At that time, as a level 85 elite, he would be a raid boss in his own right (tougher, actually... raid bosses were elite 83s, while he was an elite 85).
    • Any time, in World of Warcraft, that any kind of strategic planning is discarded in favor of just overwhelming a problem with sheer force, is referred to as Zerging it. For example, an early Wrath Of The Lich King boss called Sartharion - a gigantic black dragon - comes pre-equipped with three smaller dragon Mini Boss es. These Mini Bosses can be killed in advance - or you can take on all four dragons at once to make the encounter significantly harder and dramatically increase the value and quantity of Sarth's loot drops. This significanty harder encounter either requires planning, experience and a little time for all players to learn the fight... or just enough significantly-stronger-than-this-content-was-tuned-for players to Zerg it and burn Sarth down before he can even begin calling in his Mini Bosses.
      • Ironically, this is the exact opposite of the Zerg Rush concept. Rather than a multitude of weak units overwhelming the dragon, it's a standard number of much more powerful units.
        • It's a twist on the Zerg Rush concept, but it's still a simple strategy of quick, overwhelming damage on a single target with no backup plan rather than anything fancy or complicated. It's close.
  • Basically the entire premise of Pikmin.
    • The C-stick in the game is used to direct the mass of pikmin following you in a more precise direction, and when facing an enemy, is circled around to rush the entire pack in even faster. There's nothing more satisfying than swarming a tiny little Bulborb with all 100 of your minions from all sides.
  • In Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, this is the main tactic of the Free Drones, a faction of socialist proletariat who have a distrust for the well-educated upper echelons of society that once oppressed them (and so have a certain Dumb Is Good ethos). They feature an industry bonus (the citizenry being made up almost entirely of blue-collar workers) and a research penalty (...the citizenry being made up almost entirely of blue-collar workers), resulting in being able to deploy vast quantities of units but having subpar equipment. The Hive, the only other faction with an innate industry bonus, usually works similarly but to a lesser extent, mainly because they don't have a research penalty. They do have an economy penalty, though, which negatively effects their ability to research.
    • Another faction that likes to Zerg Rush is the Believers. They have a bonus to Support under their preferred political system which allows them to field larger armies, combined with a bonus to attack and lack of research that causes them to have lower-tech units then normal (albeit not exactly weaker so long as they strike first). They can't build as quickly as the Hive or the Drones, but they can maintain a larger army and their bonus to attack is incentive to strike first.
  • The Brotherhood of Nod in Command & Conquer makes use of this at lower tech levels, able to produce huge numbers of cheap, expendable militia troops, as well as light, fast attack bikes, buggies, and tanks. However, while most soldiers fighting for Nod are poorly-trained, poorly-armed rabble, the other end of the spectrum is comprised of a much smaller group of super elites using technology that's often superior in many ways to that of GDI. If Nod has a single overarching approach to warfare it's not just zerging the enemy, it could probably best be described as sending favored sons to stab him in the back with a billion-dollar dagger made from alien technology while he's busy fending off the ragged but very fanatical mob in front of him.
    • The Scrin in Command & Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars can readily spam Disintegrators and buzzers while building an army of tripods in the background. And, since they're actually aliens, they are the real Zerg of this series. And let's not mention the mind-controlling cultists used by Traveler 59.
    • In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the Soviet Conscripts are pretty much designed for this tactic; Very weak, very cheap, easily spammable.
    • Any faction can zerg rush an opponent with rifleman in the earlier games. Infantry have now been nerfed to the point that even the lowliest of vehicles is still marginally better than the best trooper (sans the Commando units, but you can't readily rush with them due to the one-per-army limit).
    • Allies and Nod both relied on Zerg tactics in the first game of their respective series, mainly due to the fact that even their strongest tank was pathetically weak compared to even the lightest tank of the opposition. Somewhat subverted with the Allies, as they had Cruisers with BFGs that can level a whole base on Naval maps, but totally straight with Nod, as even their Air support was inferior to that of the GDI (they had no naval force whatsoever).
    • An interesting subversion: Some players (especially in Tiberian Sun, where APCs can travel underground, past barriers and undetected) would load up an APC with Engineers and rush it into the enemy base. Since all base-producing functions was concentrated on the Construction Yard, a good Engineer rush would cripple a player long before the real fighting started. It's more of a traditional Zerg Rush (where you cripple your opponent) than the more popular meaning.
    • An interesting variant (actually predating the Trope Namer) was the tank rush. What makes it a subversion is that this tend to be used with GDI's Heavy Tanks and Mammoth Tanks, the two heaviest tanks in the game, that would just steamroll over the opposition. You still use overwhelming numbers, but due to the cost and build time of the tanks, this is likely a late-game tactic. It is gruesomely effective, as fending off all those heavily armored tanks can be extremely difficult to near-impossible (especially Mammoth Tanks, as they literally had no weakness to exploit).
    • China, in Command & Conquer: Generals. Red Guards, the basic infantry, are built two at a time. Troop carriers come with 8 Red Guards free. To further encourage massing, groups of five or more of the same unit in close proximity get a damage bonus.
    • Then again, the GLA faction has Angry Mobs, which is 9 civilians with pistols and rocks (unless you Arm The Mob with AK-47s) counting as a single unit. It's fun to throw a mass of 200 people firing AK's and throwing molotov cocktails at your opponent's base.
  • Rise of Nations has the Terra Cotta Army wonder, a Zerg Rush kit, basically. Every thirty seconds (initially; it goes up by half a second for every infantry you control), you get a free basic infantry unit. Read that again.
    • And, once you get the research (wonder?) that makes all timers complete instantly, you can basically send a never ending line of basic infantry trudging across the map towards your enemy. More like a Zerg Irressistable Force.
    • Also present in the game are the Chinese race, whose main bonus is instant villagers. Depending on Age, villagers can be upgraded to simple military units. This makes for a semi-effective anti Zerg Rush tactic, as a Chinese player with adequate resources can spam their city with villagers up to their population cap. Which can mean several hundred instant soldiers.
    • There is also the upgrade "Artificial Intelligence": All units are created instantaneosly, regardless of power or cost in resources. (Assuming you can pay, otherwise it doesn't work at all)
  • The Mordor faction in the The Lord of the Rings: Battle For Middle Earth RTS is a prime example. Their basic unit is weak but free and comes in large groups. An even more extreme example is the Orc Labourer from the Isengard faction, an unarmoured orc wielding a woodcutter's axe. They each take up 1 command point, in a game where the command point cap is usually 300 at the very least.
    • This very much applies to the armies of Mordor (and to a slightly lesser extent Isengard) in the original novels as well. Sauron is practically the poster boy (poster-Eye?) for the 'plenty more where they came from' school of evil strategy. His Orcs are clumsy, cowardly fighters and only effective in huge numbers, especially against skilled warriors like (most of) the Fellowship.
  • Scout rushes are a frequently-suggested (if rarely-executed with more than 3 Scouts) strategy in Team Fortress 2--Scouts can reach the objective before any other class and have twice the capturing power at the cost of lower firepower and health.
    • The addition of the Pain Train for the Soldier and Demoman that gives them additional capturing power in exchange for increased vulnerability to bullets may start shifting the Metagame.
    • You can conceivably rush with any class, or any combination of classes, but some are only for comedy.
  • In Total Annihilation, the equivalent tactic is the Flash Rush (or, inevitably, "Flush"): Arm's Flash light tank isn't quite the fastest or cheapest unit, but for its armour and firepower (dual energy machine guns that provide a slow but steady stream of damage, while also sounding awesomely like the Hyper Blaster from Quake II: the light laser of Core's equivalent unit, the Instigator, just isn't the same) it is very cost-effective and very brutal en masse. The default AI is vulnerable to rushes of any Tier 1 offensive unit besides the Commander even at the highest difficulty.
    • The Peewee Rush was even more brutally effective, but tended to crash the game due to having too many units on the screen...
      • This one isn't because of the number of the units, but the gun they fire. With a slight hex edit, the game supports 5000 units at a time. The problem is the sound the Energy Machine Gun (The Peewee's weapon) makes, and the way that Direct X 5 handles sound.
    • In Open Source remake - Spring - most mods still feature flash rush. Peewee rush is usually not as effective though - bigger maps and rebalanced stats mean that it won't reach the target before dying, unless their amount is really big. AoE units tend to deal with hordes of weak units in seconds, which reduces usefulness of this tactic. Peewees still have a role in the game, but it's not rushing.
  • World in Conflict has America being overrun on being esentially Soviet Zerg Rush. No missiles, just bunch of parachuting armies and war machines.
    • The first half of the campaign pits you against a Russian force generally 2 to 3 times your size; the first few missions pretty much end up in a total retreat.
  • In Warhammer Online, whichever of the two opposing realms (Destruction or Order) outnumbers the other is often accused of using this tactic to win in RvR, using their increased numbers and over abundance of tanks to steamroller the opposition. Trouble is, the tactic often does work if the underpopulated side can't put up a decent melee line to slow them down whilst their ranged take them apart.
  • In Dawn of War, Orks have an upgrade that allows them to get Slugga Boyz (their basic troopers) for free. This is fairly late game (as you need to already have most of your base built before the upgrade is even unlocked) but it allows the Ork player to fully embrace the concept of human wave tactics as wave upon wave of his boyz pour into the enemy base (in DoW you can have your units set to "auto-recruit", thereby allowing you to command your units without having to micro back to your base for reinforcements. Since Boyz now cost no resources other than head-count, this means a literal green tide).
  • One of the Event Matches in Super Smash Bros. Melee is called "Super Mario 128", where 128 smaller, weaker Marios swarm the field and you have to defeat every one of them.
    • And just so you get the point of how weak Zerg Rush soldiers can be, these soldiers can be defeated with any attack in one hit. Even Luigi's taunt.
      • Ah, so that's how you're supposed to get that bonus! Wait... event matches don't give out the bonuses... crap.
  • Darwinians, basic Virus units a.k.a. Virii and especially Multiwinians in the Darwinia series include such sheer number of units at disposal that they outnumber Zergs at least from eight to one during peak moments.
  • The coliseum in Tales of Vesperia uses this trope. You're forced to fight wave after wave of monsters, and it isn't too bad until you start fighting stronger Mooks that have the ability to stagger you. From there, you'll probably get staggered over and over and over again until you die. If this wasn't bad enough, bosses join the rush at set intervals.
  • Both your side, and the enemies' side can employ this trope in Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings. If you don't capture a summon gate quickly enough, then often you can end up pratcially wading through espers, in order to reach/capture it. On the other hand, if used against a level III esper (provided that most of the other espers have been taken care of), it can be quite helpful.
  • Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds, since most of the differences between forces are in unique units and cosmetic changes, can let anyone do this. It's comparatively easy to sledgehammer a nearby opponent into the ground simply by hurling a swarm of basic troopers and mounted troopers at it. Of course, this can come back to bite you when everyone else upgrades tech levels first and curbstomps you with pummel siege engines and assault mechs.
    • The republic however get the ultimate Zerg Rush ability, They can put out troop units a lot faster then everyone else and their Tech tree is meant to send clone troopers to the field (Their tech gives you more food and better med droids to keep your men alive), the Rebels get slightly sturdier troops with decent anti armor to compensate for their lack of Zerg Rushing production and the Trade Feds have no housing required but lacks the resources to produce soldiers.
  • Left 4 Dead has this for the regular zombies. Whether the AI Director summons them or if a player gets vomited on by a Boomer, a huge swarm of zombies will all rush after the team, surround them, and proceed to beat the crap out of them. In VS mode, infected players may adopt the rush strategy by either having everyone attacking at once or rushing in after a Boomer player does his job.
  • Survival Crisis Z, oh man. Go to act 3 and find a neutral safehouse of level 11. You will never see the end of the mob.
  • Disgaea blatantly states this in the tutorial of the first game, saying the best strategy in the game is to rush one unit wildly with your soldiers. This is also an effective strategy for distractions, by sending out weak and useless characters, thus the AI auto targets the weakest link, leaving your main fighter several turns of beating the ever living hell out of the enemy.
    • Absence of Justice makes a reference to this after the first battle of the final chapter. After Mao smothers a Prinny bomb set by the brainwashed Vatos and Champloo helps them resist brainwashing relapse, a squad of brainwashed seniors appears to take down the group. The Vatos get a brief CMOA at this point by calling in their relatives for a diversion - all two hundred thousand of them!

Almaz: Heh... when you can't get good help, get more help...
Sapphire: Indeed. Numbers are power. Human wave tactics of this scale can only be called amazing.

  • Serious Sam often has moments where rather weak Kleer skeletons or Marsh Hoppers can overwhelm the player just by having so many of them at the same time.
    • Also, the headless suicide bomber. Seeing one appearing over the horizon is amusing. Seeing 50 of them coming at once is terrifying.
  • While Supreme Commander doesn't have a single faction that utilizes this tactic, the scope and scale of the game lets the best fulfillment of this, since the Arbitrary Headcount Limit is much higher than the usual FPS. One interesting (although ultimately doomed even against poorly placed defenses) strategy is to build 10+ factories with assisting engineers and pointing the freshly made robots and tanks towards the enemy base, sending a constant, never ending stream of units. This tactic can even work if you take the chance to send some siege-breaking units to destroy the front rows of enemy defenses, or use this stream as the distraction for a better localized attack.
    • Possible the best thing ever about Sup Com? Artillery rush! That is, building a continuing stream of artillery up to the enemy base and laugh with glee as his outer defenses are shredded to pieces by 50+ small artillery placements. Or better yet, if you can muster the resources, building 5 HEAVY artillery placements 10 Kms away from the enemy base and watch as the base simply vanishes by the 3rd or 4th salvo. Considering you manage to keep such a grand project hidden from your foe.
      • Maybe you can destract him using waves and waves of T1 bots rushing his base...
      • Fails against defenses? Not really. If you're sending enough units, the defenses will fall. In particular, the Second Cybran mission tasks you with destroying an enemy base. Sending wave after wave of T1 units will eventually punch through. Eventually of course being the key word. This troper was doing it with 25 factories though, so YMMV.
      • The strategy may fail against defenses, but only when using the basic level of factories. Each up grade to the factory increases the speed of construction. Going from seven seconds down to TWO.
  • X-COM: Apocalypse has what's called the Hoverbike swarm, where you buy lots of cheap, weak, but highly evasive hoverbikes which you use to absolutely overwhelm attacking Flying Saucers. It works very efficiently for most of the game until the aliens start using Dimensional Multi-Bomb Launchers to take out many bikes in one shot.
  • Star Wars: Empire At War absolutely adores this trope. Bombers are fairly inexpensive, and have powerful weapons that bypass the enemy's shield. The downside is that they move slow and only come 3 to a squad. However, since EaW lets you drop reinforcements right next to your other units, you can drop 12 or 15 bombers essentially right on top of the enemy station in around 3 minutes, usually before the enemy has a chance to upgrade their space station.
    • Even more so in land battles.
  • The Egyptians in Age of Mythology are the ones with cheap weak troops that build fast. Throw in a few production speed upgrades and a Meteor god power dropped on a hostile chokepoint, and it's Wall of Slingers time, especially if you go with Ra and use your priests to empower military buildings. Isis boosts population cap and grants economic bonuses. This is very bad for whoever's on the receiving end. And Set has stronger slingers and the ability to summon cheap animals to fight.
    • The Titans expansion pack features the Automata myth unit; basically weak, cheap metal soldiers that build quickly. The only real advantage they have is that they can repair each other once the fighting stops. They can even resurrect their dead within a certain time limit. This can make them extremely effective when attacking isolated towns/armies: overwhelm, repair/resurrect, repeat. This is used against you in one of the campaign missions. Build Heroes. Lots of them.
    • In the same mission mentioned above, the main villain uses Zerg Rush against you by spawning Hell Gates. Except the Zerg in this case aren't weak. Not at all.
  • In Civilization III the Aztecs are made for this tactic. Their Jaguar Warrior unit is the earliest fast unit in the game, and fast units retreat at one health unless fighting other fast units. This allows for multi-turn rushes of epic proportions very early in the game. As a bonus, the Aztecs are Militaristic, which means that military buildings (such as Bunkers, which increase the total health of any unit produced in that city) cost half their normal price.
    • Also applicable to Civilization II when using the "Fundamentalism" government type - they can produce the "Fanatic" Unit that requires no upkeep or support and any reasonable size city can produce one a turn. If you have twenty cities in ten turns you can throw two hundred of them at your enemy.
  • Parodied in Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story where Bowser states that running into people's feet is basically all The Goombas learn in their military academy. He invokes this with the "Goomba Storm" special where he orders Goombas to rush the enemy, though when done right it becomes Death From Above with flaming Goombas.
  • In the Halo series, most skirmishes allow you to take on one squad of a few grunts/jackals backed by a brute/elite at a single time. When the drones show up, they go down easily and typically carry piss-weak weapons, but show up in really large groups. The flood also tends to send in wave after wave of infected (even more annoying in Halo 3, as flood infection forms can revive the combat forms you just put down).
  • The Husks and Thorian Creepers in Mass Effect. They're not very effective with it, except in the higher difficulties, however.
    • But in Mass Effect 2 the Husks are back with force, and in the tight, confined spaces they prefer to attack in, they will overwhelm you in moments unless you make very good use of your crowd-control abilities--even in Normal difficulty.
      • That is if you don't realise that a single throw (or similar) will kill them instantly.
        • On Insanity, they get armour as well, which severely negates the effectiveness of using knock moves to kill them
    • This is also how geth hack as well; as a "platform" will often have over a hundred geth (Legion has over a thousand--good thing it's on your side), they can just overload most firewalls.
    • Pre-genophage, the Krogan used this tactic.
    • The final cutscene battle in Mass Effect has Alliance capital ships doing a Zerg swarm against Sovereign. Despite Sovereign being vastly more powerful than any of the Alliance ships, it's eventually overwhelmed by sheer numbers and destroyed.
    • Mass Effect 3 trailers show Hundreds, maybe thousands of Reapers descending on earth. Averted/Inverted, as Reapers are Not cheap and Not weak, but still incredibly numerous
    • Conversely, this is the Alliance tactic to win back Earth in the finale -- throw every vessel they, plus the considerable alliances you've spent the game building up, can beg, borrow, or steal to beat the crap out of the Reaper main fleet in an epic battle royale. If it hadn't been for the Crucible, it would have been a monumentally disastrous defeat.
      • Indeed, this turns out to be the final strategy for the final ground push against the Reaper transport beam to the Citadel. A massive forced of troops and armored vehicles rushing into an opening in the enemy defenses, hoping to close the gap before reinforcements arrive. Harbinger lands right in front of the objective and slaughters the entire force in seconds. Only Shepard and Anderson make it to their goal.
    • This is the strategy on both sides of the geth/quarian war in Mass Effect 3. (The quarian fleet also gets a few knocks in against a Reaper Destroyer this way via markerlight bombardment.) The end result, if Shepard is unable to broker peace, is that one side or the other is wiped out to the last ship and you have to pick which one.
  • Zerging a strong army with peasants in the Total War series is a viable strategy to wear them down. In Medieval II, when the Mongols and Timurids arrive, this becomes a very effective strategy, if only because once they arrive, the invaders have large armies but lack cities or castles to replace their casualties. You, meanwhile, can replace your losses, so you can just keep hurling armies at them to wear them down.
    • This is epitomized in the later Napoleon: Total War, due to the fact that muskets are deadly whichever way you look at it. Even against cavalry and cannons, a swift advance with full armies of militia will defeat most enemy armies. The only downside is morale, because Militia tend to break easily during combat (this is true for previous games as well), though this can easily be countered by a single expensive (though instantly recruited) general. Also, each militia unit that gains some experience will quickly become as good as inexperienced line infantry - without the exorbitant upkeep cost.
    • The Oda clan in the Shogun games recruit ashigaru (peasant) units cheaper than the other clans, and lend themselves naturally to this kind of playstyle. To add insult to injury, in Shogun 2 their ashigaru also have lower upkeep costs and stronger stats than the other clans' ashigaru. All-ashigaru armies (which you can field a lot of) is usually a valid tactic for the Oda.
  • Pretty much in any stage in Spore will the AI creatures, tribes, civilizations, and empires launch massive waves of enemies at you. This can be really irritating especially in creature stage, in which at most your pack can contain four other species while a single nest can contain 8-12 creatures (and there's a mod that adds even more).
    • Naturally, the best strategy in the tribal and civilization stages is to have sheer numbers over the enemies. This is especially easy to employ during the Civilization stage because land vehicles are rather cheap and sea vehicles only cost some 500 sporebucks more, making building an entire army very easy. Just hope that your that your machines are actually powerful enough to wage a war against a city.
    • Enemy empires (including the Grox) have no trouble being able to launch their massive space navies at your colonies.
  • Grim Grimoire - Behold the power of the Imp Rush.
  • A bug (or so we hope) in Panzer General 2 allowed the Red Army to buy the T-34 tank for free, thereby allowing you to fill the map with them and Zerg Rushing the vile Nazi.
  • The favored tactic of the Mastermind archetype in City of Villains. Though it varies depending on level and powerset, the average Mastermind can summon six minions to boss around. On Mastermind-heavy teams, upwards of 40 characters can be running around a map.
  • The mutants in Crackdown 2 employ this swarming tactic.
  • In the Homeworld verse, Vaygr strike craft squadrons have more units than their - individually stronger - Hiigaran equivalents. However, the Kadeshi are simply the kings of this trope.

(a few hundred Swarmers attack the Mothership)
Fleet Intelligence: The enemy seem to rely heavily on fighter-class units.

    • Good thing they're really, really awful at defending their fuel supply
  • The Soviet Union pretty much solely rely on this tactic in Hearts of Iron II, especially in Human-vs-Human games where the Soviets enjoy five years of having to do nothing but build up their Industrial Capacity and then spam infantry/militia. The strategy can even compete against a talented Germany player's blitzkrieg tactics simply because they cannot replace the losses incurred fighting that many units spread over the entire European-Russian area.
  • The weapon of choice of the Swarm in Gratuitous Space Battles. The Swarm's ship hulls are noticably cheaper than their enemies' (which is everyone) but consequently their hulls, shields, and armor are also weaker. As a result, the Swarm can put a lot more ships on the field, especially in high-budget battles.
  • And of course there's Garden Gnome Carnage [1] where seeming endless swarms of elves scale the sides of your building in an attempt to... give you presents?
  • This is a desperation tactic sometimes deployed in Dwarf Fortress, if whatever it is that's attacking a player's fort has wiped out the professional military (or turns up before there even is a professional military..) Dwarves have also been known to mass-stampede onto a battlefield on their own, not to attack, but to recover the clothing and armor of their dead compatriots.
  • In the FPSMMO PlanetSide a Zerg rush was usually necessary to effectively wedge the enemy out of a tower. Taking a base was no real pain, requiring a multi angled approach until the enemy could be booted out. Attacking one of the outlying towers however... wave after wave after wave of soldiers holding doors open, having rockets spammed inside before a sizeable group of power-armored infantry could rush the basement where the spawn room was... God I love that game!
  • Some players of Steel Panthers are prone to do this: buying hordes of infantry (as opposed to a good infantry/armor mix), mortars (as opposed to howitzers) and cheap recoiless rifle jeeps (instead of tanks), even in open maps! The newest versions of this game have made spotting harder, which can make this trope more effective.
  • In the fighting game "BlazBlue" the character Arakune uses a sort of Zerg Rush stratagy. God help you if Arakune curses you, because if he does he will summon a MASSIVE horde of bees and other insects to attack you. In fact, Continuum Shift gives you an Achievement for getting a 70-hit combo with Arakune, called "BEEEEES!!!!"
    • He doesn't even have to be on the screen to combo you: examples. Lots of curse combos last a long time on normal competitive matches.
  • Muv-Luv's BETA use that as their main tactics against the humans, and it usually proves to be very effective, since they outnumber the human forces on Earth at least 20 to 1, the average human pilot does not survive longer than 8 minutes into their first battle, and the BETA have control of the Moon and Mars. Plus it helps that there are 10^37 to 10^37+10^37x9^10 (It depends on how you interpret what The Superior says) BETA in the universe. As one player wrote in a stream of consciousness journal while they played the game for the first time, "BETA are zerg. Discuss."
  • And in the Kohan games, the Ceyah (Undead) have the Zombie unit. These guys only cost a small amount of goal, have no upkeep cost, and can be made from the start of the game. The only limiting factor is population room. Throw in a Necromancer or a Kohan that can summon the dead, and you are screwed. Oh, did I mention that most of the Undead have damage resistances against ranged attacks? And don't get started with Shadelings. They are like Zombies, but have an upkeep cost of 1 stone per unit and are probably the fastest units in the game.
  • One of the selling point of Shining Force Neo is that the game enables over 100 monsters on the screen at the same time. When that actually happens to you, you're doomed.
  • In Backyard Monsters you could wait weeks to finally get the highest level non-champion monster and send like 12 in or you can send in 250 of the lowest level guys and watch them wreck crap. The beauty is that you're method of sending monsters in can't actually fire that many at once so you need to do it about three times and if you do the game will crash. So yeah you zerg rushed the base, the catapult, and the game itself.
  • EVE Online has this everywhere. Gods have mercy on your soul if you get caught in a big expensive ship by lots and lots of small cheap ones.
    • The big Alliances in player owned space typically like to jump in huge fleets of 300+ ships into other systems when invading, in order to overwhelm the enemy's defenses.
  • Section 8: Prejudice's AI is somewhat prone to doing this at times, especially in Assault games when the defenders go into Sudden Death. Subverted by the fact that they have the exact same stats as the player, although anyone with experience will have far better accuracy than they do. A fun game is to intentionally allow your team to go into Sudden Death and then stand outside your remaining Control Point shouting "THEY SHALL NOT PASS!!!!". The effectiveness of this strategy is debatable, but the awesomeness is undeniable.
  • Nazi Zombies plays this trope as straight as is possible.
    • No, seriously. They attack in their dozens, and on higher levels, the player can be firing full-auto into the with a machine gun and there are so many of them that the mass of zombies is still coming towards the player. At that point, you need More Dakka (thankfully, there is the Pack-A-Punch machine for just that purpose).
  • Reason why Egyptians are broken in Seven Kingdoms II. Tactic? Build seat of power that not only increases Egyptian cities' reproduction rate but also allows you to conjure Isis, which give you instant boost to population, then build a few forts around cities and mass-conscript. The fact that Egyptian military units can use ranged attacks at literally level one doesn't help.
  • Kirby Mass Attack is an aptly-named game, to say the least.
  • In Call of Duty Black Ops, the level "SOG" throws pretty much the entire NVA at you. Endless hordes of AK-armed, respawning Vietnamese soldiers that charge past the Khe Sanh defenses and lob grenades into your trenches. There's a reason it's considered the hardest level in the game.
  • Trying to Zerg Rush in Age of Wonders II against the CPU opponents is not typically a good idea as the CPU will try to keep construction pace with your own army size. Additionally, the size and strength of the opposing force units is a major factor in the CPU determining what kind of threat and response level it will assume but it focuses heavily on quantity.
    • Generally the CPU will reliably fund three or four full stacks of units that stay together and defend its territory based around a Hero unit if given the chance to assemble the forces. This army descending upon you from out the Fog of War can be quite off-putting.
    • Races that have low-level units with debilitating attacks (Draconians, Goblins, Shadow Demons and Syron) can spam those, but after they clear out weaker neutrals, reinforcing them with something tougher quickly becomes increasingly necessary.
  • A favorite tactic of the darkspawn in Dragon Age: Origins. Especially pronounced in the run-up to the Final Battle in Denerim, in which many fight scenes will just consist of dozens upon dozens of darkspawn (most of them One-Hit-Point Wonder "grunts") pouring in toward your party from somewhere offscreen.
  • Galactic Civilizations: the AI has a soft spot for swarms of fighters and frigates. This tends to work well right up until the largest size of vehicle comes into play, at which point the path from [insert your homeworld] to [insert enemy homeworld] becomes littered with the husks of burning ships.
  • The Jagged Alliance 2 megamod v1.13 (named after the last official patch being 1.12) by default enables the "Drassen counterattack": if the player's team of mercs, I.M.P. characters (one-time-paid) and/or indigenous recruits take all three sectors of the city of Drassen, a cutscene plays which concludes with the Queen ordering an all-out attack to take the city, since it has both a valuable mine and an airport. In vanilla gameplay or with the option disabled fortunately she doesn't especially besiege the city although she may send several patrols to harass the town, but with the option enabled (as v1.13 by default does), she will instead mass them together -- often at least sixty individual soldiers -- for a simultaneous attack on what's usually three to five tired mercs without prep time and possibly a smattering of militia.
    • The game's combat being limited to twenty individual enemy soldiers in-sector at once means that the player's mercs/recruits and militia will only be facing twenty simultaneously, but that simply means that those first two soldiers are continually replaced with every death, as are their replacements.
  • Terraria's goblin army works like this. They're fairly weak, but there's at least a hundred of them every time they attack. They're quite difficult when they first appear, afterwards they're a joke. The Frost Legion works similarly, but they're a LOT tougher.
  • In The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword's finale, Ghirahim sets a horde of Bokoblins, Bulbins and Stalfos onto you to slow you down from preventing the resurrection of demise in the past. It is one of the most epic moments in the game. He also specifically mentions that they are not meant to kill or even stop Link, because they incapable of doing so, and are only useful to slow Link down.
  • Mega Man Star Force 3 has a multi-part minigame in which you try to fend off hundreds of cheap Omega-Xis clones for a certain amount of time. The mechanic is repeated during the endgame, but that's not a Zerg Rush so much as getting rid of random projectiles.
  • Pokémon Rumble Blast, in one of the types of battle, has you send all your Toy Pokémon (including the one you sent out) to take out a army of Toy Pokémon. Another one has you fight a bunch of Toy Pokémon trying to defeat your 3 Toy Pokémon and defeat the boss.
  • Evolva. Seriously, play this game and you'll be amazed at the great amount of numbers of enemies that attack you at the same time every single battle. Sometimes you may enter in combats against twenty enemies or so.
  • This tactic from an ancient version of League of Legends. Heimerdinger, who can place down turrets as an ability, prevents minions from moving through the middle lane by blocking their path with those turrets. Patched up ages ago; friendly units can freely move through Heimer turrets.
  • This is a commonly used tactic in Kingdoms Of Camelot on Facebook. The easiest way to take out an enemy city's defenses is with an initial wave of Militamen, the cheapest, most basic unit of the game. 'Scout bombs' are also used to destroy enemy scouting ability, sending a large wave of scouts to kill the opponent's scouts.
  • In the (currently practice-only) level of FHBG titled "dinner blaster", just as the player has started to take care of two Sneakers, a load of Burgers fly in from the sides.
  • This is the main use of the secondary weapon of the Ur-Quan in Star Control, which launches waves of weak fighters at the enemy. The Orz marines can also be used this way.
    • The way homeworlds and other important worlds are defended in Star Control II also qualifies. They are literally just infinite swarms of the respective alien races' ship designs.
  • Stars! has a variation with "chaff" tactics in late game exploiting tactical AI's preferences in target selection (reports vary, but chaff both has high rating/durability ratio and requires disproportional amount of B to build). Missile ships are rushed by a vast stack of small beam ships - very cheap and light (which allows to churn them out at every planet with a dock and gate to the frontline planets), at the price of being weak and each having less Armor than advanced missiles do damage. It's a bait wasting most of the damage done by missiles (expensive to build, which limits the numbers), with relatively few proper beam warships following it (even beam capships are not very fast). Sure, "chaff" gets killed, but the swarm absorbs hits and gets closer, with untouched heavy beam ships right behind it - and once they are in range, it's their turn to massacre missile ships. The remaining chaff gets some shots too, and their many beam weapons help to clear minefields, but neither is their primary purpose, just a bonus. It's a part of Tactical Rock-Paper-Scissors (Missile Ships > Beamer Ships > Beamer Ships screened by Chaff > Missile Ships).
  • Kinnikuman: Muscle Fight: Benkiman can summon a horde of his fans in one of his supers, who proceed to trample his foe. The attack hurts a lot unless the foe blocks. Sunshine can turn into New Sunshine and summon a legion of sand grunts to run over his foe.
  • The Summon Raging Spirit spell in Path of Exile, a very cheap and spammable spell that summons tiny flying minions (up to 20 at a time per player by default) that can rapidly overwhelm and get in the way of enemies. Excellent against most grunts, but loses part of its utility against bosses (they can't be body-blocked by non-players and most of them have area-of-effect skills that can't be intercepted).
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