Depends upon what you might be doing, and what's feeling like a slog (and why).

What's your average game progression like? Do you focus upon early housing or opening glades right away? Stuff like that will give a good idea from which people can give advice.

How many game years are you spending on them? Do you spend a lot of time paused and making decisions? A lot of it is just personal preference/playstyle.

My settlements usually end in year 7, I always play at 1,5 speed so the 12 minutes estimate 8 per year. Of course I sometimes pause the game to strategize smth.. I never stopped but I think it takes me about 2 hours per game.

My gameflow is: Quick Contracts first, then some slogging until I got 2-3 big openings, then a buildup phase and after that I oftn struggle NOT to win if I wanna do an achievement first cause the ppl are steamrolling happiness.

I play diff 10 until it climbs by distance.

try to run the game at 3x more maybe?

I'll admit I haven't been keeping track of the number of years. I want to say my games are probably in the 7-10 year range once I complete one.

Early on I'm focusing on opening glades as quickly as possible. I pretty much always start by building two woodcutters, and one other camp for getting food.

I pause the game pretty frequently but not for long durations.

One of my problems is that my progress is frequently blocked by something. Often I'll be missing critical buildings for production, or I'll be missing critical ingredients, or both.

I'm rarely able to generate much reputation through my people's resolve.

Maybe it is a strategic thing. Not all races have synergies and some biomes are considerably harder depending on your caravan and embarkation possibilities.
Many little struggles can quickly add up to a hurdle.

When I started out I always tried to start with a farming building of any sort or with amber to buy one asap if it was too expensive in embarkation points.

Another strat I did was starting with training gear delivery line, being able to quickly open all stashes you find can be extremly helpful.

Overall helpful: If you find things you don't immeadiatly need for your ppl to survive: lets say: a reward of 40 pickled goods, but you can not produce them yourself and you don't struggle to survive atm - DENY it you ppl.
Maybe half a year later when you are able to satisfy something else and you enable the pickles, they might be happy enough to push through a point and unlock a new building choice.
Whereas letting them have the pickles as soon as you earned them might not have had a real impact.

Originally posted by Blips:

I've played a few games now. I'm at level 8 or 9. I'm playing on veteran difficulty, and an individual game is taking at least 3 hours to get through.

Is this normal? I feel like I must be doing something wrong, because each game feels like a slog.

I have 1350 hours in the game. I still need 3-4 hours per game.
Playing them much faster would feel wrong to me.

I spend the vast majority of my time in 1x and pause and yes, it takes hours to finish a run. I haven't been keeping track, but it may very well be up to 3 hours. When I watch opthers play, they seem to use the faster speeds more, but I don't like to use the faster speeds much since I feel like I can't micromanage as well.

At my pace, I probably should've been able to finish all the seals and P20 by 250 hours, but I've had to reset a couple runs near the end over really stupid stuff.

cut into glades faster. They aren't that bad. You can usually knock them over and get the map done reasonably quickly. Map should probably take an hour or two.