How to: hexagonal tile grid without simply instantiating a tile prefab many times

I am fairly new to unity and as such ran into a fairly obvious (but fundamentally massive) problem. I am working on a turn based strategy game. In order to make the map i followed several guides that instructed to take a hexagon tile prefab and essentially instantiate it many times to create your grid.

my problem is my large map is 150 x 150 tiles........ 22500 tiles all with mesh colliders is not really feasible. (not to mention takes an age to procedurally generate. It's pretty obvious that commercial games out there are not doing what I am doing, so how the heck do i get a tile based map of potentially large proportions without simple instantiating a prefab 22500 times?

Thanks in advance for any help

 

You can use the Mesh class to generate mesh chunks that contain many tiles each, which will be far more performant. I think there are some assets on the store that do hex tiles.

--Eric

 

indeed after months of searching for a different way i discovered a bunch of tutorials to make tile based grid system using a single mesh. However no hex grid tutorials as of yet, unfortunately I cannot spend the $$ in the asset store at this time.