I have found that Stencyl doesn't seem to be very good at handling very many actors in a game. I had been trying to implement some basic AI at the moment all the behaviours were: wander (pick a random point and move directly to it) and wrap around screen (if it goes off the top of the screen it appears at the bottom). Even with these simple behaviours and calculations the frame rate dropped dramatically when there were more then 50 actors on screen:

10 actors: 60fps

50 actors: 30-50fps

75 actors: ~30fps

100 actors: 15-20fps

200 actors: 8-10fps

I had planned on having a maximum of around 200 actors but I see that's no longer an option and implementing a more complicated AI system with flocking behaviour, looking at creating a game in a similar vein to flOw.

I understand that a game is perfectly playable at 30fps but this is a super simple test with ultra simple graphics, no animations and no sounds is child's play in terms of calculations to be made.

Is this a limitation with Stencyl or is it flash? Should I simply scale the scope of the game down or is there a better game engine that exports to .swf that I should look into?