Has anyone successfully supported 1000+ fighting units in a single scene in Unity?

I understand this is very difficult to do smoothly on today's machines, on all types of engines, Unity, UDK, CryEngine, etc... but maybe someone out there has figured out a way to optimize and manage resources efficiently...

has any of you successfully supported a huge number of AI characters in a single scene, performing actions concurrently? assume the actions are very simple (walking, following targets, shooting), with simple mechanim animations...using rigidbodies, and each unit has about 5k polygons. It's sort of an RTS game.

I'm currently researching ways to make this happen (and am making good progress), but didn't want to be reinventing the wheel if someone has already figured out a clever or better way

 

Woah, 5k polygons for an RTS game? I can't answer your question to be honest, so apologies right off, but that's a lot dude. 5k is what you'd see on a player model in an over the shoulder game. That's pretty high detail. Well, not THAT high, but for an RTS, I would be surprised if most RTS game's units are over 1-2k polygons. They also incorporate height/bump/normal mapping to add extra depth. Again, I've got no clue how to optimize 1000 units in your specific case, but cutting down on polygons is going to turn your scene from a 5,000,000+ polygon scene to a 1,000,000+ polygon scene... just in units. (this is assuming no LOD).

 

You might find this short thread informative ...

http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/skinned-meshes-performance-issues.261492/#post-1744155

 

If you try to create battles in the scale of Total war you must play with teams of units and not with its unit separately. Also 5k polygons is not an option