Model performance for mass battles game - triangle count?

I'm working a project that is a mass battles game, models and the like similar to a Total War game.

My question is, as I am not a graphics person and I need to give a rough polygon count to my modeler for them to shoot for, what is a good triangle count for a humanoid model when there will be roughly 1000 of them in the scene?

 

PC is the target platform. I don't currently have a lowest spec device, I'm looking for a ballpark right now and then I can tweak accordingly. As far as I can see, 1060 is the baseline video card right now. I am running a 1050 on my dev machine as it is lower than standard so if it works good on my machine, then I know it will work good on better cards.

 

I'm tempted to say that it doesn't matter. You should use multiple LoDs all the way down to basic imposters if you want lots of characters on screen. It's then up to you to decide how many characters will use which detail level based on performance.

 

I may need some reference material for that. My modeler is asking for a polygon count to shoot for. Is it possible to take a high polygon count model and "LoD" it down to lower polygons at runtime to increase performance?

This is an area where I am very green at.

 

For characters, it's probably best to have your modeler generate the LoDs manually for you because an automatically-generated mesh would most likely look terrible, especially once you start thinking of animations. For basic things like rocks, there are probably lots of tools that can do it, bu either way you would normally want to have them generated offline and simply switch between the different mesh quality levels at runtime.

The highest poly count depends on how close you want the camera to be. Maybe start somewhere around 10K triangles, and then each subsequent LoD would have a poly count divided by 4 until it looks absolutely terrible, at which point you should switch to textured quads (which is a whole different problem).