What part of the computer is responsible for how many npcs will i be able to see before the game crashes.

[xxJesterLordxx]

Pretty straightforward. Im planning to buy a pc on which i will be able to screw around with bunch of npcs killing each other and having massive battles around but idk on which part should i spend the most so i can have max amount of them before the game crashes.

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

In most systems, that would the CPU + RAM. But of course, if you spend your money there you'll wind up with a weaker GPU which would then become your limiting factor. I'd still recommend focusing your budget on CPU though. What you describe, lots of units with AI, that's very CPU intensive and there's nothing you can do about that. Graphical settings and resolution can always be turned down to squeeze out more fps from a GPU.

 

[xxJesterLordxx]

In that case does it mean that a cpu with more cores or bigger frequency would be better?

 

[TMTOWTSAC]

You'd expect more cores would be better, but most game engines were written a while ago and favored single core performance with a small number of threads. Starcraft II would be a classic example, it loves clockspeed. AotS is a newer game that responds well to more threads, but it took some time and a couple of patches to make full use of Ryzen's extra cores. Some older games are also receiving optimization patches, Total War did not run well on Ryzen but got a patch just last month that boosted performance by 10% or so. Newer RTS game engines will probably favor more cores but they're still trickling in.

TL : DR
It mostly depends on the game engine being used, older RTS games still favor single threaded performance, newer are shifted towards heavily multithreaded.