Hola! 
So, I’ve made a small voxel engine (Think minecraft) Which currently doesn’t do much - it draws lots of cubes in a random pattern (hills and such) and these cubes are shaded in accordance to which direction the sun is shining in.
The game I’m going to create with this will be an RTS style game (think dwarf fortress… kind of) so naturally the camera will be zoomed out.
The problem is that with an aerial view camera, you render so many more blocks than you normally would if you were to, say, play minecraft. I understand the concept of chunk loading, but with the amount of chunks that would be ideal to load, I’ve calculated I’ll end up drawing 2.5 million tris !!!
I’m also not drawing faces of cubes which are touching eachother.
I’ve considered maybe combining some faces (currently everything is put into the computer as quads, but I believe it splits it up into triangles for the GPU), but because of the huge number of permutations you coul dhave with different numbers of combines faces, it would be impossible to combine the faces in such a way that it would be optimal AND not slow the game down in the process.
This is a quite considerable stopper to the development of the game, and it’s only gonna get worse the more things I add, currently I’m just rendering blocks :'D Could anyone help me?
P.S I have the source in a zip file but for the life of me I can’t figure out how to attatch it:(