Some progress...

My battle system is complete. When I tested it out on my actual iPod with everything running at the highest possible capacity, the performance slowed down; but by cutting out some non-critical animations, I got it to run really smoothly even with the enemy and player groups at full size and both sides' attack intensity turned up really high. The battle system looks /slightly/ less cool, but it's a minor downgrade and well worth it to get it running at a smooth 30fps. So I can put a big green checkmark next to that item on my to-do list... as long, of course, as it doesn't slow down again when I go back and add sound to it after enabling the victory, settings, and title screens (all of which is gonna be pretty boring, but needs to be done). It better not...