That's not a mod thing, that's because Petroglyph has patched the game a few weeks ago to fix issues with save files crashing, with the downside that save files now take longer to make. When it hangs on battle start, that's the autosave being created. We can't change how the game saves, but you're able to disable autosaves to make load times almost instantaneous like this:
Topic: 2.2.4 Hangs at loading conflicts (Read 1964 times)