UnitPolygons

Well, it all depends on how efficiently you render them, and what other stuff you want to do. I've seen people render several million polygons (or other insanely high numbers) and still get descent framerates. I however, can't seem to get past a couple thousand triangle primitives plus almost 100,000 line primitives without noticable preformance drop... [crying] (have 800mHz processor! + using VB6)

But in all honesty, if you have only 40 units max on the screen, you should be fine in the 200~1000 range easy, might even be fine with 1000~3000. You could always make models for multiple LODs, so that you can display more in the background, with less detail.

Make a couple test models (800, 1500, 3000, whatever), then see how many polygons you can get. That's the best solution I have for ya.

Good luck!

You need a target platform to get any kind of real numbers. What works well on a 4GHz P4 w/GeForce6800 will run very badly on a P200 w/ TNT.

Make sure you have access to a PC that matches your minimum spec. Grab a model (many free sources exist) and see how many times you can render it on screen while maintain an acceptable frame rate.

This gives you a very rough idea of your polygon budget. Of course you need to pad your results to keep in mind AI and other processing as well as non-unit rendering (terrain, etc).

Well I have just started this project and my modeler is asking how many polygons he can use per unit. The game is just going to be a fairly straight forward RTS. As my moddeler has alot of other work to do I dont want to waist his time with lots of rebuilding I just want to give him what is considered an average polygon count to work with and then test it out. Can anyone suggest a average polygon count that they think is the norm for a RTS?