I've found that when people first fire up the game, they see a lack of a turn button anywhere and think "Oh, this map will only take an hour tops" because that's what they're used to from more than a decade of playing games marked as RTS titles.  This isn't a knock against these other games either.  I love RTS games, my shelf at home is covered with them, but it's important to note that Sins does a lot of new/different things. 

But look at those other games you're used to.  You're playing on a pretty small area, you probably only have one or two bases, and one main attack force.  Within 5minutes it's possible that you've found your enemy's main base and within 15 you have enough troops to attack.  Again, because the enemy is pretty close to you at all times.

A Sins game *can* be that fast, if you play on a small map, but if you play on a medium to large map, you're increasing the explorable area, the number of places an enemy can hide, and the number of resources available to build fleets etc.  You also introduce additional players, pirates, trade, diplomacy and the complexity level goes up, as does the amount of time it takes to play.

Frogboy has posted elsewhere on the forum that for every planet you add to the game, you're adding roughly 6 minutes of playtime.  So a small map with 10 planets could take an hour.  20 planets is 2hrs and so on.  So if anything, length of a game is a factor of how large a map you select.  Just like in a game like GalCiv 2, the larger the map the longer it will take to play.

Ironclad set out to do something different with Sins.  It's a game that can take an hour, or it can take a month.  Perhaps there was a failing on our side for not making it more immediately obvious on how to get a "quick" game going.  I know my temptation is always to fire up a huge map with as many bells and whistles as possible, but then I end up with a game that, while full of fantastic moments, huge fleet battles, diplomatic subterfuge, backstabbing etc, it's going to take forever to play the game to completion.

To help on this end, I'm going to work on a guide covering what settings combinations/maps will give you quick/medium/long games.  This is a completely new type of game for most people, and it seems that it needs a little bit more in terms of guides to get the most out of the game.