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.
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