Got my issue today and played around....

First off, one can eliminate a lot of lag by turning off shadows completely. I turned it off and voila!, game runs smooth as butter on high settings with a P4 3.0Ghz GeForce 6600 255mb vid card and 1gig RAM.

Next... one can use the Minimal UI to make it MTW/STW style. Very very nice and useful.

Kill rates and unit speeds are pretty good from what I have seen - units don't move too fast and kill rates aren't bad when one plays with a more even field (as in Pavia). Will get more when I play more...