In 1 it kills them all (or rather as many as it can) instantly. Here I have to wait for each one to individually die in turn. Making it a much slower progress.

Here are a few things that can speed things up:

1. Turn off the audio. Each sound effect takes time, and by disabling audio, you no longer have to wait for it. (The audio isn't that great anyway.) This is actually a *huge* speed up.

2. Ctrl-A (IIRC) is auto-attack, which will speed up battles with large numbers of easy enemies. (At high levels, a good strategy is to cast Power Shield then auto attack until the enemies are dead.) I don't remember if there's a way to speed up *just* the effect of a spell without having the next character auto-attack.

Also, there are a couple things to know about the Turn Undead spell in MM2:

1. It only targets the first 10 enemies. (Holy Word doesn't have this limitation, and it doesn't age the caster in the DOS version.)

2. If Turn Undead has already been cast, both Turn Undead and Holy Word will fail for the rest of the battle.

There are other problems with the Turn Undead spell.
It will stop working if your alignment shifts, or it only works for Good characters.
There's an "integer overflow" bug, which means it stops working after lvl 16 or so.

Yes, unfortunately due to a bug, after level 16 it becomes pretty much useless.

The 1-at-a-time annoyance is there for all mass destroy spells, not just turn undead.

Thanks :)

Though honestly, I never had an issue with Holy Word aging my cleric as she also knows Rejuvenation.

Don't forget that Rejuvenation can backfire and raise your age. In particular, if it would lower age below 0, it will raise age instead, and it raises age about half the time even in other situations.

(On the other hand, if it would age you past 255, IIRC Rejuvenation will cause age to overflow and become small. Resurrection, on the other hand, will not.)

Divine Intervention also causes aging, but it is a very useful spell (especially if you're using Max HP Potions, which, by default, give 512 Max HP per use).

Yeah, it was especially useful in the Xeen games where you could use it as many times in battle as you wanted as long as you had the SP.

Actually to be honest, I can't play it without the sound effects, it adds that "retro charm" not to mention I can concentrate on the battles better with it.

But even then, spamming enter speeds through it just as well :) of course not automatically.

I considered that, but I was like "I'll worry about that when I get there" besides I'll be sick to death of the "retro charm" by that point ;)