I am looking at engines to test out and one of the ways I wanted to test them is by making simple Napoleonic game where player can command large armies composed of ~75k soldier per side.
I’ve tried UE Mass system but it seems it only handles random behavior of the entities and making something more structured is not possible
The only other instanced rendering I found was Instanced Static Mesh component which is not what I want. I need nice, animated models of individual soldiers
The main performance problem here is def going to be the mesh animation. With so many soldiers, skeletal meshes are not feasible. As ZacD posted above, you will have to make vertex animations and animate instanced static meshes using them.
Once you get that going, you could get acceptable performance even without Mass Entity system, if you use efficient C++ code.