Possibility of playing hundreds of animations at once on Android

Hello!

First off, I’d like to state I’m not new to game development. I’ve made lots of projects in the Unity engine, so game development and programming are not new to me.

The reason why I want to give Unreal a shot is the following: Skinned Mesh Renderers in Unityare extremely, EXTREMELY expensive on mobile. Even with (seemingly) insane amounts of optimization (as I outlined in this post), I can’t get more than 30 characters at once in the same scene. My idea for the game was to be able to assemble an army and attack different castles. I’ve seen other games with the same concept, but I’ve yet to see a game with a 100-300 character army on mobile. The most characters I’ve seen at once in a mobile game was in Fifa Mobile, which has about 20-30 soccer players. All this leads me to this question: Is it even possible to have hundreds of animated characters on mobile?

I’d like to know if this is possible before I invest the time to learn Unreal as well as I know Unity. From what I’ve seen, Unreal looks really interesting and capable (some say it’s superior to Unity), so perhaps Unreal’s skinned meshes are better optimized for mobile than Unity’s?

Thanks for any insight.

100-300 characters is really much… You can try do this but with hard optimized bones and maybe particles…