Thanks for the pointers. The target market won't necessarily have a good pc, so I really need to work on an economic level. Im keeping textures at 256. Im going to try and make the game run-able on the minimum requirements of GS, at least 32mb video, 256mb ram, etc.

Here's a quick list of items on the screen.
1. A small to medium sized terrain
2. max 8 human characters (I made a test character who clocks in at just under 2000 polys. Im going to try to keep those as low as possible.)
3. Scene decorations (trees, houses, etc.)

The graphic style is cartoon, so I should be able to get away with low poly objects. Im going to add a simple normal map shader that can be disabled on lower end pc's. This should add a bit more detail for those with better rigs.

I hope this gives you a better idea of what I need. How many polys then? 20k? 50k?