I was able to test it, this auto-battle is cool. I don't know if it will help you, but the bugs with the fights don't occur during the fight, but before it starts lol
I think the more details I get, the more confusing the source becomes xD. But they’ve been a great help none the less!
I’ve compared the changes from 0.80 to 0.81 and unfortunately there is nothing obvious for me that seems capable of causing these problems, so I’ll have to drill by trial and error on the testings :(. DO you at least hear the battle jingle the battle starts, or does it just straight up freezes?
Already checked it. It is still hard to understand the problem, but I have an idea of several things that might be going bad. I think one might be the explore button not being protected, other might be indeed performance, and it also depends on the Android device, for example, in my test device it is not possible to repeat this error using a finger, I might need an auto clicker that can click faster than me XD.
The most likely is performance, I might have made changes on v0.81 that deteriorated performance. I think so because the time from the end of the introduction title to arriving at the beach takes almost 5 second in your case and in my test device takes only 1 second, running the same version, so on slower devices the performance degradation is probably crucial for the bug to happen.