Simply lowering the graphical settings doesn't have that much of an effect. It will save me some FPS, but not nearly enough to be what I consider acceptable.So you've turned down all the options to their minimum and it's still unplayable?
The only way I can get decent FPS, is by pressing "Ctrl-T" until all the vegetation disappears. But this isn't really an acceptable solution, in my opinion. I just tried playing one of the tutorials, (The one where you start out with two regiments and are initially told to repel a small Confederate attack from atop a small, forested hill.), and it ran in 10 FPS unless I started doing the Ctrl-T-routine. Not acceptable by any standard of comparison.
I would not regard 10 FPS with four regiments on-screen as "playable" by any stretch of the imagination.Unless you have a very poor computer "unplayable" is not the exact word.