I haven't checked yet, but it seems to me like a large majority of the turn processing seems to be movement and combat animations. Worth doing a retest with quick movement+combat as with them enabled the turn transitions could potentially be a lot faster.
Thanks for this savage! I'll probably pick it up soon, but I've got deadlines all over the place next week so need to focus on getting all my reports done first.
For now, until it is an option we can change in-game, you can turn off the annoying as fuck auto cycle in this file: Now to patiently wait for the patch that delivers city population/border growth notifications because it blows my mind that we don't get them at the moment.