I think I'm going to have to not bring it to game nights for awhile. Six people, for three of whom it was their second game and two of whom their first, spent a little over four hours dealing with the Syndicate. Part of that was my fault for forgetting the Fleet Limit, so there were a couple times that we spawned in ships that took a sector up to 10-11 opposition ships. Even so, after about the third turn, only one sector was flipping station cards at all. The last few turns consisted of Wrath going into the overrun sector, bringing back a bunch of opp ships for us to crush, and making sure that one of them had a bounty that prevented station cards from being flipped by unengaged opp ships. The Solar Ransom had 30+ tokens on it because we hardly ever spent any time in that sector, Wrath and Basileos had 40+ attack and Warbeast & Tharendim had mid-30s, and even with only 8-10 defense on the Strike Force ships, none of the enemies were doing anything to hurt us.
A lot of the time was spent trying to figure out what to buy, and getting everyone used to the order of phases, events, and when they could play boosts. Those are things that will obviously speed up with experience, but still - that was a long time for a game in which the players were never in any serious danger.
My solo games where I've played two ships have usually led to my demise relatively quickly. The group games I've played with 6 people have pretty much steamrolled the opposition and just taken some time to grind through. I'm guessing that 3-4 players would be a better balance between the two. I also have only used technovores and syndicate for new players, so a question for folks who've played more would be this: How would you rate the different opposition fleets in terms of difficulty scaling with number of players? Ideally I'd be curious to hear responses about this for both normal mode and elite mode.