I recently joined a mod team for a game and am required to design military tanks around 3000 polys. I'm doing just fine except for the fact that the poly count goes way up when I triangulate. (as some of you know, polygonal faces must be triangles only in games) I'm not entirely sure how many polys I should put into the tank treads and wheels. The image below shows what I have. Before triangulation is 803 faces, after triangulation is 1760 faces. Obviously, I need to duplicate this because a tank has two treads, so this poly count is WAY too big.

I'm doing the treads as a bunch of cubes. 85 cubes to be precise. Should I be modeling the treads differently? If I do, I'm not entirely sure how the others guys would animate it. In Maya, all you have to do it parent them to a curve, then do some lattice work and boom, you've got a moving tread, but I doubt they'll be able to do this.

Perhaps I need to model the treads as one big object? Take a cube and extrude it around the wheels maybe? then hope the animators can take that and animate it somehow?

Any insight on this would be greatly appreciated. Mostly, I just need to know how many polys for the treads and I'll see what I can do with the rest. Thanks in advance.