Slitherine

I'm a huge fan of the original Master of Magic, and very enthused by what I've seen of the Slitherine version. It seems very true to the original; I'm not concerned by hexes, the UI is fine with a little practice, and the new unit art (when you click on each unit) is fantastic. I haven't figured out how to rename Heroes yet (am I just missing this? it did take me a minute to figure out how to name created artifacts) but the ability to rename (or raze) towns at any point is excellent.
My one real complaint at the moment is the end turn times, and screen loading animations. Whenever I want to load the menu or save a game manually, I have to wait for the menus to fade in from the ether. It's a cute little animation, but I'd like to be able to turn it off. When I click on a menu, I'd like it to open, not try to entertain me.
The end turn times quickly become prohibitive, for a modern game. I move a unit or two and tell my cities what to build, and then wait forever while the computer moves. I'm not sure if this can be fixed, but I'm hoping it can in a future update.
Is there any hope of this? I'm kind of busy, and a long game like Master of Magic is a challenge to squeeze in anyway; I don't want to spend half the time I'm playing waiting for screens to load and turns to end. Thank you!

FYI on the load times, for a frame of reference:

For me the load times aren't too bad. Between turns on a Small map it takes about 5-8 seconds.

I'm running Win 11 on a Dell XPS 9320
i7 12 cores
32 GB RAM
2 TB SSD

I suppose my PC is getting a bit old by comparison.

Windows 11 on HP
AMD 6 cores
10 GB RAM (physical)

So maybe the issue isn't the compression. Still; 8 seconds on a small map, depending on how far along you are in the game... are you talking at the beginning, with one enemy, or against four opponents at the point where Sky Drakes and Armageddon start to be factors? 8 seconds at the end is great; at the beginning, not so much.