Any suggestions for speeding up turn processing?

[Uncle_Joe]

OK, with the 1.25 patch and Balance Mod 1.03, I'm again trying to get 'into' SE5. So far, I'm actually beginning to like the early game phase now that I'm starting to get used to the um...interesting...interface choices. The combat is pretty cool and the colonizing is more balanced (I actually feel like I NEED Organics and Rads).

However what is killing the game for now is the extreme time it takes to process a turn. I'm only on about turn 18-20 and each turn can take a full one to two minutes just to process. I get the 'Processing Turn' indicator and the green bar starts moving. It stops and the red (combat I assume) bar crawls across the screen. Then, the green bar will move another inch an so and then the red bar crawls across the screen again. This can be repeated numerous times and REALLY drags the turn out. To make matters worse, you cant even alt-tab out and do something else while it processess!

I have already turned retreats off but this has proven to be little help. This issue really makes the game feel like drudgery. In the early game, it can take 6-7 turns just to get ONE TECH that improves ONE AREA of your econ by perhaps 10%. That mean that you are going to be cycling a LOT of turns to get anywhere (not bad in and of itself...Civ4 has 600+ turns with no problems). But if even if the early turns are going to take MINUTES to process, then the game slows to a crawl and I spend an awful lot of time staring at an essentially blank screen watching those bars slowly crawl across the screen.

So, the original question stands...what can I do (in game, not PC-wise) to speed up the processing? Are there any other settings that will help? My PC is not top of the line anymore, but its not obsolete by any means (I can run Civ4, M2TW, EU3 etc with no issues). So I'm concluding that it must be something in SE5 that I can turn off or tweak or shorten or SOMETHING. To me, this can be a real game-breaker.

Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!