I have to hand it CA or whoever did the coding:
I have turned UP all the details from when I played RTW. AI have ADDED things for my card to do (Bloom, shader v2) and... my framerate is higher than it ever was in ROME, especially during city battles. I have more units on the field at once, and they look amazingly better than in RTW.
I have no idea why this is... just reporting a very very strange fact. It's better by a factor of about 20% consistently (5+ fps).
For this I THANK CA!
Now... PLEASE work a little harder on the AI for future patches... that is where the game will have its legs or not.