Performance with 100+ CharacterController's

Hi,

I'm making an RPG targeted for mobile devices and I made a few tests with more than 100 enemies. Each enemy has a CharacterController attached to it and I'm using Move() and SimpleMove() to steer them around. On a PC it runs smoothly, but on an iPad 3 I'm getting 15 fps at most.

I tried completely removing the CharacterController component from all enemies and moving them with transform.Translate and I'm getting 30-60 fps, but of course the player moves through enemies and the enemies move through walls.

To be sure that the problem doesn't come from the pathfinding I made a clean Unity project with 200 cubes with CharacterController and just set them to follow the player around. The result was the same - 15 fps at most. When I remove the CharacterController component I get more than 60 fps, so I think it's clear where the problem comes from. I even tried caching the transform.position, vector normalizations and other heavy calculations, even calculating them every second instead of every frame - same result.

So what is the standard way to approach this problem? I can imagine it's a common issue with every RTS and RPG out there. Please suggest some optimizations!