For those with slow machines

I do not know if this works on RTW but for MTW, this useful little trick has given me the ability to play huge battle maps with huge armies despite an old and increasingly slow machine.
All one has to do is pause the game, then instead of unpausing, one holds one of the command keys (W forms a wedge, C forms close ranks, etc etc) and the game will run much cleaner, smoothly, with an FPS improvement from as low as 7 to as high as 30. The tradeoff is sound is lost, except for talking by the message boxes like "The enemy is fleeing" and the sound men make when issued an order. The marching, the sword clashing, and other things that really chew up a lot of computer resources are gone. Another advantage is that one can control the game more carefully, as to "pause" and reallign a unit or something merely means lifting your finger off the key you are holding down. Be careful though, more than once, I have hit the W key and formed a wedge when I wanted a close-rank line.

Theres an easy way around this and your probably overworking your machine for other games. I'm guessing your real problem is the onboard sound(if that's what you have) not your processor itself

Go to control panel
Sounds speeches audio devices
sounds and audio devices
Advanced for your speaker settings

And turn them all the way down

Now if you have a sound card that's both up to date in both hardware and drivers theres something else going on.

This does not make a great performance boost for most of my games but makes a huge difference with MTW.

Go ahead and try that and hopefully you will end up with much better performance.

Basically if the audio hardware isnt there why tell your machine to do the extra work for somethings that's not there

Well, it is a rather old machine, 800mhz, geforce-2 PCI, 128 RAM (never got around to upgrading to 512), though the sound-card is quite new, a very decent phillips edge (I wanted sound-blaster but the price was out of my league at the time). I am not expecting this old betsy of a computer to be zinging fast, but I will try what you recommended, for I certainly don;t want to be outting the old-girl through more than necessary, I'm quite fond of her. Sounds crazy don't it?

If you want huge units just go into the options and turn everything down except huge units. It should have a pretty good framerate not having to draw all the extra special effects. You can try turning unit detail to high or highest as well. As far as graphics are the units need to be the best looking because that's where all the action is. All the background stuff is just that, in the background.