Your statement reminded me that when I started a new game, their is only a long wait. Once in the midgame, the game hangs. I can wait minutes for the bear to attack. If i try to click on the screen, FE's window goes black and I get a window message that the program is not responding.
Edit: I was not having this issue in 0.77. The only diffrence in play was I am now playing a game on a large map. I played on medium or smaller in 0.77. The other possibility was that Nvidia updated their driver a day or two before 0.85 was released.
I ran an expiriment by rolling back my driver to the previous version. The game still lags when I get attacked by a maul ability creature.