RTF is a global modification that replaces all towns in the game.

Zakhar said that for the global map, it's best to stay within 500-1K polygons, with a maximum of 2-3 thousand.
It depends on whether it's an object or a character.
For the arena, 2-3 thousand, with a maximum of 5-7.
The engine can handle more, but the more such objects there are, the higher the chance of a crash.
Yes, and let's not forget that this refers to the number of triangles, not regular, square polygons.
He may not have said it exactly like that, but that's the information I took away from our conversation.

Interesting, about the large number of objects on the map, yes, I encountered this quite recently - when I was testing the Yeti, I placed approximately 50 random units within the screen, and the FPS dropped almost to zero.

I think I've figured out the reason for the model crashing with 10K polygons; this is just a theory, but the problem might have been with the texture - a model of 64 trees had two textures of 512x512 applied to it, meaning each tree had a 512x512 trunk and some additional details... that's 33 million pixels, while the gnome, which has 19K polygons, has two 1024x1024 textures, which is, at the most pessimistic estimate, 4 million pixels, or 8 million including the mirror, I need to reduce the mirror size.

In older mods, textures often didn't have time to load in the hiring window; you open the lizard-mage, and it's a mess - arms, legs, and heads sticking out in all directions, and everything is brown, but after a moment, it all disappears, the textures have loaded. Since I started cutting models and combining textures from different models, these lags have become much less frequent