Hmm, I am going to marry real soon, despite playing MP-Dom2 (and nothing else), but already I can really understand your point...
Once (or maybe twice or three times) a single turn took me as long as three hours, but usually I manage a difficult mid-game turn within 60-90 minutes as well...
"F1" and "n" are a good hint, but my own problem seems mostly to be that I am pretty slow in making up my mind (like "should I attack now or next turn?" or "what are we forging now?"). So I decided to be less careful: E.g.: If I already have a decent gem income, I just set the spell casting site searchers to cast it somewhere that they hadnt tried before, rather than reflecting chances with respect to terrain, the success of previous searches, proximity to the enemy etc. The game offers a lot of depth which is cool and tempting, but its not always important to optimize really everything...and that dangerous to pseudo-perfectionists like me.
PS: Oh, and I've decided that playing on any map being bigger than Karan is a pretty bad idea! (
To the ones with the paint-brushes: More smaller (wrap-around) maps please!)
PPS: Avoiding the awkward in-game message editor and using this Boards message sending system instead also saves time!
PPPS: Renaming is also useful, but I dislike silly names for roleplaying reasons. So for example, I always rename all sages so that their name starts with the same letter their random path is in, (Fire= Rename him with something starting with an F) in order to find them more quickly if I need to forge a simple item (Luck Pendants, Bracelets, AimingEyes,...). Giving Family names might also speed up things.