Aggrogate

Tuesday’s Trope: Zerg Rush

[Tuesday's Trope is a weekly department highlighting an amusing video game trope from TVTropes. Aggrogate is not affiliated with TVTropes.org in any way. All trope examples come from TVTropes and are shared via the Creative Commons license.]

You don't need big guns to take down the enemy. Sometimes you just need to swarm them with your weakest, cheapest units to erode their defenses and crush them in a spectacularly humiliating manner. This is called the Zerg Rush, and it's been a common trope in video games since before it got its name from the original Starcraft. Sometimes it's another player rushing, sometimes it's the computer, sometimes it's the underlying mechanic of the game. Just keep throwing guys at your target until it goes down.

It's interesting to note that the Zerg Rush in Starcraft is actually a slightly different and much more specific technique than the trope. The Starcraft Zerg Rush is the rapid building of zergling units with intent to quickly overcome the enemy before any defenses can be built. The broader Zerg Rush trope includes any sort of swarming tactic using cheap, disposable units.

Examples of the Zerg Rush 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 Star Craft is rather different than the above description.
• 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 5 workers 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.)
• 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.
• Dynasty Warriors. Any enemy faction against the player character.
• 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.
• 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...
• The Brotherhood of Nod in Command And 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.