It was a combination of the tutorial pop-ups at the start, and then the game pausing to play out an animation. Both together just felt like a lot of stopping and starting. But the tutorial windows stopped popping up pretty quickly and I got used to the game pausing for the animations. It makes sense why it's needed so I rescind that bit of feedback haha
I do think some of the animations are a little too long (especially some of the death animations), so I need to go through and make them all a set length I think to make the turns flow better. I also probably don't have to wait for things like damage animations to move on to the next tile, and can just wait for them before moving to the next phase. I just didn't want to get into too much async stuff in a jam game since async is such a bug factory.a