So what I ended up doing, is creating a number of collision only actors (boxes in my case), and spawning them in the same location as the tiles.
Static Mesh Actors that render are heavy and take forever to generate, but if they don’t render they actually generate pretty quickly and don’t impact performance much.
You should see about creating a hex only collision surface and spawning them along side your instanced static mesh hexes. Then you’d have a data object for the hex and collision for stuff to trace against or sit on.
10 DOP-Z may work for hexes, see: Static Mesh Editor for how to do that.
If not, check out: FBX Static Mesh Pipeline for info on generating custom collision.