if you're running out of polys, you could reduce the segments of the single elements, some of them at least, without too much visual loss. I know that a single segment is just 6 tris, but 6 x some hundreds of greebling elements means that you could cut around 1k tris, which isn't that few.
BTW, counting the polys has sense only when the mesh is optimized.
If you want to make a very fast test: open the model in truespace, use a boolean operation with delete edges enables, and then triangulize again.
It'll get rid of the majority of the useless polys, you still will have to optimize it, but it is just a fast test to have an idea of the real pcount of your model