The_Mark had conducted some tests with the wait command before, and had this to say:

Quote Originally Posted by The_Mark
About those waits, they are there to remove lag. Most of them (the 0.5 ones) are in the piece of script that is the player part of the govt script, which is essentially a large endless loop. Even though the script engine can handle small endless loops without any lag, a 4000-line long loop is a bit much; the game would be unplayable without pauses in the middle, that give the processor some time to wheeze. There are 3 waits in one govt script chunk, so the loop is processed in three parts, with a 0.5 sec pause between the parts. When I tried just one pause, the script gave lag-spikes with steady intervals, and too many small waits actually hurt the performance even more and few short waits didn't have quite enough effect on it. So I struck a medium. The wait commands itself use processing capacity, so cutting them will lessen the strain from those, but them may also negate the effects of the pauses on lower-end systems. Semi-lower and medium grade systems could very well benefit from it.
So, getting some more reports from people about what kind of speed reduction they're seeing would be nice, comparing with and without the changes here. Please report what processor you have, as well. Cutting the waits down may improve speed for a significant number of players, or maybe just some of us. If it's cutting 15-30 seconds between turns for a majority of players, it sounds like a good change to apply!