Elites

Related:
* Elite NPCs - opponent is likely to have the equivalent
* Leader participation - commonly one of these "elites" is you.

This is mainly meaningful for strategy games.

These are what the protagonist is in non-strategy games, singular characters that deal death and destruction alone against enemies seemingly much stronger than they, essentially the embodiments of the army of one. These are commonly named, have special powers none of their ordinary kin have, they may be completely unique as to have no "common" counterparts at all.

Usually there can exist only one of each elite unit in game, contributing to their uniqueness and power, but this is not always true (but in their case they're usually not named).