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There is not really a "defined" limit for the game, it more is a compounding issue. If every vehicle on the map has 5,000 polygons and there are 10 vehicles that's 50,000 polygons rendered at that time. As such keeping the models as light as possible helps keep the performance load reduced greatly compared to building things that are really detailed but also very heavy. For un-common (unique) vehicles which will only have 1 or 2 instances called of them on the map you can have a higher limit, but for things which are quite often used in multiples (like police cars) keeping them light really matters. Remember everything is loaded on the map, from buildings, to scenery, to traffic, and your units themselves so keeping them light where possible is what matters. Most of mine average in around 5,000 polygons all-in (equipment on the thing, wheels etc) but if it can be done lighter it's all the better since it takes less resources to load a lighter model. Doing models with 15k+ polygons is generally a bad idea since when they're all in use it will cause a serious performance hit. The original vehicles were around 1200 polygons to 1500 polygons so in comparison 5k is a very large jump. EM does not use a "draw distance" like many other games do (like gta) which lets them have much higher polygonal limits since they're only rendering a short distance away from you, not to mention you're also right up on top of the vehicle when playing that game. In EM4 since its a "bird's eye" game you're not on top of the vehicles and unfortunately it does not use draw distance so everything is rendered even if it isnt visible in your viewport. A poor design choice but it's how it was done, as such you don't want to make the mistake of trying to create things which are really over the top on detail and instead focus on making them look good while being as lightweight as possible. Due to how the game handles things performance takes a hit pretty fast if you overdo things. Be it lighting or models, anything rendered consumes resources so being as "tight" with the things you do as possible saves performance for actual gameplay and lowers the risk of people CTD'ing for lack of resources which thanks to this game's memory bleed is a real issue.

The general rule is that all verts must be connected to each other. In the one you've done so far, a lotta loose ends exist on the object so Id recommend building more polygons to fill the gaps in. See my tutorial for an example on how the verts are linked together. If you leave some unattached (or floating as I call it) they stick out and leave gaps in the model when it is extruded into 3D. The main count for modelling is polygons. Verts matter as well but not as much as polycounts. For now, what you have is reasonable, for what it needs to be. From an unrelated separate tutorial, here is what a fully contigouous one looks like.

Take the entire 'object' of polygons, and make a copy. Then mirror it on the axis to the other side. Attach the copy to the original, and go into vertice edit mode and start welding. Surface grid is the 'beginning' as explained in my tutorial about modelling from scratch. It aint done yet due to me being unable to sit down and spend the needed one week to finish the model + tut.

I'm exited to announce that I will be trying to make a good ammount of models for this mod! When I fail I will pick it up again and try even harder the next time! I will make this happen! Any tips then feel free to comment!

Got the 2nd piece in the firehouse!