I always thought that Septerra Core had pure ATB mode, which relies on how fast you click on portrait to get your next move, otherwise it won't pause and enemies might get bonus attacks.

But it seems that if you right click portrait of one of the party members, it will have blue dot in upper right corner, after that combat will automatically pause when character's ATB bar is filled by 1 segment and you can issue command without losing time.

I wonder if I am the only one who found auto-pause so many years later after the game release?))

You didn't miss it; it wasn't in the original release. :)

It's added by my patch, along with middle-mouse-click movement.

Nice. I always thought that Septerra Core could use more attention from modding community. By any chance, do you know if there is any way to see/mod enemy stats (I mean not just Lv and HP which you can see by cheats), and what are the damage algorithms in this game?

Queuing up turns was nice feature of Timeslip's patch. It made the combat much more bearable.

Unfortunately, I can't get it to work well on my Windows 10 pc. The ddraw.dll file seems to be one of things that causes severe mouse lag.