I appreciate GoG doing 99% of the emulation work for me, and repacking The Ultimate Might & Magic Archives, making them purchaseable again. I love these games.
But does anyone know the standard shortcut for slowing down cycles or frameskip etc in DOSbox? M&M1s battle text speeds by at an impossible rate. :(

Less Cycles (-20%): Ctrl+F11
More Cycles (+500 cycles): Ctrl+F12
This is the standard setting which is very unintuitive, because the amount by which you decrease or increase the number of emulated cycles is not equivalent.

Ctrl+F11 slows down and Ctrl+F12 speeds up. Obviously, the problem is that you have to do it every time you start the game. Thus, it's a much better long-term solution to edit the dosboxMM1.conf file in the install directory (typically C:\program files\gog.com\Might & Magic VI Limited Edition\Might and Magic 1 - Book I).
Simply find this part below:
core=auto
cycles=2000
cycleup=500
cycledown=20
And change "cycles=2000" to something lower.

Any thoughts on what's the proper number of cycles to get the game to play as the original game did?

Well I set the cycles down to 100 and it's kind of choppy, I might put it at 200-
But you need to use the [D]elay command in combat and set it to 9. This should make everything readable.

It is pretty aggravating. Mine seems to work reasonably well with a frameskip of 0, cycles at 250 and combat delay at 9, but input is still a bit laggy, the load screens take a few moments, and the text still flashes too quickly. MM2 seems much more playable, though.

Agreed. I used the advice in this thread and got MM1 improved, but couldn't dial it in to be entirely acceptable. But speed issues aside, I had trouble getting into the gameplay. I moved on to MM2 and have had zero speed issues and I'm finding it to be a very enjoyable playing experience so far. Takes me back to Junior High when it was new and I played it at my friend's house every day during lunch.

I put
"cycles=90"
and
[D]ELAY to 9
as soon as possible: it's just slow at the opening screen and when you exit Inns but confortable in all encounters and I'm really satisfied with it (running on a Dual Core 2).

This works with other games too? Thank you! =o

I put mine to 250 and it works quite well.

Hey guys, I was wondering... would a CPU slowing program such as CPU grabber help slow down the game without making the input laggy? I currently have my cycles set to 100 and the text is usually slow enough but the input is noticeably lagged a bit. Still playable, but I was wondering if there's a way to optimize it better.
Actually I already have CPU Grabber installed so I guess I can test this myself later, but if someone knows already feel free to let me know. Otherwise I'll post again after testing it.
I'm still using a single-core, so those with multiiple cores would need a spiffier CPU slowing program than CPU Grabber unfortunately. Also, CPU Grabber will slow your whole computer down, not just DOSBox, so if you're multitasking that might be a problem.
EDIT: OK I just tried it, and it doesn't seem to affect anything. So I guess the only way to slow down the text is through the cycles setting in DOSBox.