I’m not sure that actors for the tiles are the best solution. So far the opinions I’ve encounter says that you should try to minimize the amount of actors.
I am also battling with tile game conept and finding best solution for replication.
In the case you described there are additional questions that I think are important:
- Are tiles 3d landscape or 3d models or simple quads?
Because you might go for one actor with hierarchicaly instanced meshes or just paint the landscape and store tile data in some kind of array that would be then replicated.
- Is map generated or predefined
As far as I know you cannot generate landscape at runtime so if you want procedural generation then for 3d terrain you could go for something like voxel plugin. For flat tiles you can draw them as quads or in some other way.