It's a 32 bit exe optimized for single thread usage, I just seem to remember a forum post some time back that hinted very strongly toward this theory, but it is an approach I can understand, it will allow lower end hardware to run it with few problems.

PS. of course I'm hoping someone will make my day, prove me wrong and show it's multi-threaded.

I hope there's a lot because I love the big battles

AI processing is something Bethesda really needs to work on. If they haven't reduced its intensity on the CPU and allowed it to use multiple threads then we're screwed in cities again.

Even in games based around principle of you being single unit in a large scale battles there are not that many people. And even if you put many (like over 1000 soldiers in Mount&Blade) it will slow down your PC really bad because no matter how strong your PC is, it will slow down with every NPC with on the screen.

Even then it wouldn't happen....

i am just hoping for a modest 30 combatants.

As a rogue I do better one on one, or in small groups that can be lured apart, that sort of game play.
But I hope there are some epic scale battles in Skyrim 40+ at least, as long as I can nip and skip in between the chaos stabbing a spine here, cutting a tendon there and maybe slashing a throat or two before disappearing again I'll be happy and just as long as there's no one I need to keep alive during the battle, because unless they have lady luck strapped to their back they'll be in for it

It's all just personal opinion of course, but I sort of hope there won't be any "big" battles with "lots" of characters at once. You need thousands for a battle to be properly epic, and if you can't manage that, then you really shouldn't try at all. A faux "epic" battle with like 25 participants doesn't qualify as such, and only really serves as a reminder of how small the game world is. I'm not complaining about the size of Skyrim, but it's not exactly Daggerfall proportions, which it would need to be to support that kind of a battle scale. Otherwise you'll just get something moderately larger than the ones in Oblivion, but no more satisfying

40 people sounds right to me

LOL remember the battle of Bruma? That was jokes/pathetic

Sounds like 25 is the rough estament of the majority, dosent sound too bad to me. Large battles or not, Skyrim is going to be the best game on my list for quite some time.