Game with lots of Actors, efficient way to do animation

Hi, I’m relatively new UE4 developer coming from OGRE3D background. I want to make a sort of RTS/tower defense with UE4 but coming from C++ background, I am slightly troubled by Blueprint efficiency.
Currently, I am estimating 100 turrets for each player, and up to 8~10 players hopefully, so somewhere around 1000 turrets. I am currently trying to animate my turrets and realized at one point or another I need to use AnimBlueprint ie) I can write a c++ class to handle animation details, but the animation itself has to be done by a Blueprint class.

My question is this: Is there anyway for me to directly control the bones of my turrets from C++ file? If I can’t do that, would using Blueprint for animating that many objects cause performance issues?