Of note, I believe setting the difficulty to Novice (or whatever that difficulty is called) will actually reduce the number of enemies per encounter. This should shorten encounters, making it take less time to get from point A to point B. (You will get less experience, however.)

It wasn't the difficulty of the random encounters at all, they were very easy. With 3 Mages in my party I was able to defeat most encounters in the first round nearly every time. It was the time of loading the encounter, choosing my actions, the spell-casting animations, the time to display the measly/low XP and treasure, and then the time to rest (and hoping I don't get hit with another random encounter while resting).

It was just annoying, like a mosquito buzzing around your head while you're trying to read a good book.

Your mistake, I believe, is resting. You should find other options to keep your spell points up. Specifically:

1. Use fountains to restore your magic.
2. Later, use Recharge on items that cast Magicfood (but save first).

Are there that many fountains in the wilderness, I haven't found any yet. In this specific case the only fountains of which I was aware are all far away, and I don't have Recharge yet nor any Magicfood items.

At your current point in the game the well in the starter dungeon is the nearest opportunity for restoring mana.
Later you can spend lots of time there with save/reload to recharge magicfood items without destroying them.
Still very time consuming.
Imagine you didn't look at mana regeneration rate at creation, you'd have to rest even longer for your spells.

Cosmic Forge has a cheat option which lets hp and mana regenerate much faster but the game still remains slow.
Fine if you have nothing else to do and want to kill time but not if time is valuable for you.


Here's a review by someone who got bored but finished it nevertheless, maybe you get fresh motivation reading it:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/564808-wizardry-vii-crusaders-of-the-dark-savant/reviews/23424

LOL :D!!!!!

I've never even looked at Cosmic Forge, mods/whatever are not really my thing and I don't even know if I could run it on my Mac in any case.

Thanks, I read that review but it hardly motivated me to continue :D! Playing a game just to complete it is totally not my thing either. If I'm not enjoying a game, I have no regrets about quitting in order to spend that time playing a game I enjoy instead.