TGEA and Polycount

#1 Just like any other engine, it depends on the use of the model.

Are you going to have 50 of these on screen at once, or 1? Are you going to have 30 characters on screen, all different, but all using the same general poly budget? What is your target video card/computer hardware?

Each of these questions (plus dozens more) affect poly budgets.

What I'm getting at is two things:

--poly budgets are scene specific, not model specific
--questions about polys per model are not ones we can answer--only you know how you will be using the model, and how it will fit into the rest of your scene, what will be going on at the time it is being viewed (is your AI so complex for this model that you need to focus cpu cycles on that instead of complex art? who knows).

#2 There will be 3 to 10 characters on the screen at a time with some trees, buildings and debree. The main character is the hight poly character the others are 2000 to 3000.

the AI will be the stile of F.E.A.R and Gears of War. Don't worry its not another Gears of War game.

#3 Again, though, it comes down to how complex your trees, buildings, and debris are. If you have a high-poly count in the scene, areas that it has to chug over will be remarkably slower to parse than lighter poly areas. You should also keep texture size and shader processing in mind since their overhead is the new big thing to consider.

#4 TGEA can handle high-poly characters and such - but can your target hardware?