I don't want to make it seem like remaking the combat animations isn't appreciated, as they do look nice. The thing is, this game mechanically heavily encourages players to go grind dungeons for XP, new characters, and resources. (To the point of saying so in the loading screens.) Specifically, it heavily encourages you to go grind low-level dungeons like bandit dens because you get basically the same experience from high-tier stuff like salamanders as you do from a rat, and you gain far, far more exp and phys from just telling your blacksmith to go stab rats for a couple dungeons in a row compared to maybe getting 4 XP per gametime turn and maybe 1 phys every game day. By contrast, I completed a slave request on the second turn of the game by taking a slave right off the market, going to the first fighter guild "clear this dungeon" quest's dungeon, and using mentor such that I gained 150 XP one extra encounter past the boss. (And the gametime turn was taken up by travel, at that. It's easy to do 10+ dungeons per day once you get a few casters who can use teleport without wasting time with actual traveling.) Telling the blacksmith to just bash rats over and over is going to train her Phys dramatically faster than just crafting, as well. (Again, because you can't use Charm in combat, it's harder to train, which makes service jobs relatively worse options.)
So, to the point: Can there please be something that speeds up combat animations? The new combat animations take about 1.5 times as long. Even just having something where the damage numbers don't stop the game for a full second until they go away, or cut the time they're displayed to only a quarter of second would be nice. A majority of the experience of playing this game is just waiting for damage numbers to disappear so you can click on the next rat to train your character so they can actually start being good at their job. (Or having casters spam healing to train their wits.) This is also what makes things like Aire counterattacking so ungodly annoying, since getting 50 extra attacks in per round is about an extra two minutes of time per round just waiting for her to resolve all her counterattacks, which will kill you of boredom if it doesn't kill you from damage.
Likewise, please, please let us turn off that new "sliding initiative" thing. It's adding at least 3/4ths of a second onto each action.
There's also the "crossing swords" and fade-in/fade-out transitions, where the former takes about 2 seconds and the fading transitions often take at least a second of time before the game actually reacts to your commands. The post-battle results page also takes at least a second where it's locked before you can confirm. Being able to click to skip the transitions would kill a lot of dead time.
Yes, I know I'm talking about portions of a second, but this is a game that encourages you to fight through thousands of battles, taking half a dozen combat turns even on easier battles, if not a few dozen on more difficult, and thus longer, battles, so trimming these animation deadtimes could seriously cut hours off a playthrough.
Some kind of interruptible auto-battle setting would also be nice, but just making it so you don't have to wait on the animations to keep clicking the next order would be a tremendous boost.