thank you ryu! that was exactly what I was looking for!! now I'm at somewhere around 1k total for the whole model. It works beautifully. and by the look of it I can strip a model down even further than that if I want to use it as background stuff.

So say I want to have around 10-15 creatures on the screen (at maximum) and a little bit of scenery in the battle instance, is 1-1.5k poly going to be alright? what would be a good ballpark number to try to stay under?