Unity 3d: TileMaps - Part 1 - Theory + The "Wrong" Way
Why Game Development Stack Exchange recommends it
Game Development Stack Exchange answerers point people to it when they ask how to build tilemaps in Unity, as a beginner-friendly walkthrough of the wrong approach and the better one.
Recommended by 3 people across 3 different months, 2013 to 2016.
What it is
The first part of quill18creates' Unity 3D tilemap tutorial series, aimed at pure beginners. It covers basic 2D tile map theory and then builds a map the naive way, with one GameObject or plane per tile, to show why that approach is limited before later parts fix it.
What people said
Recommends Lokkij · 2013-11 · Game Development Stack Exchange · on “textures in tilemap games: use 2d planes or 3d objects? (example with Dragons of Atlantis)”
Although I'm not sure whether this will fully answer your question, I want to point you to a tutorial series [this video] that might be very helpful to you if you want to make some kind of tilemap. The guy in the video first explains the "wrong" way (have each tile be a plane) and why exactly it's "wrong", then he goes on to explain what the "right" way and showing how he would implement it. The series in total is a bit long (~5 hours), but you'll probably be able to skip some parts where he might be explaining things you might already know.
Recommends Mythics · 2015-09 · Game Development Stack Exchange · on “Unity procedural TileMap generation without creating gameobject per tile”
Here's what I'm aware of: Option 1. GameObject per tile. It's not completely horrible in certain cases. Depending on your needs, it could work.. well enough. Option 2. A single quad or plane referencing a texture you create at run-time. You would essentially use your tile atlas texture to "paint" your map as one new texture. Depending on the size of your map of course, you might want to have multiple quads/planes each representing portions of your map. Option 3. Create your own mesh. This would more than likely be the method you'll like most once implemented. It'll give you tons of flexibility and probably the highest performance. You would essentially create a quad per tile and set each ver
Recommends Uri Popov · 2016-04 · Game Development Stack Exchange · on “Tile base Farm Simulation in Unity”
I'm going to give you a rather stupid answer but what the heck. First of all hundreds of objects in a game is no problem. Secondly there is this guy called quil 18 that has great tutorials. Start with the Basics of 2d tile maps [this video] and then you can watch this gigantic series about a base building game here [LINK]