Okay, first I should say, the AI is very good in Sins of a Solar Empire, but there are some stupid things it does that really take away from the fun. I'm sure this has been bitched at before but it obviously wasn't fixed (At least completely) so here goes a rant. The overall goal would be to replace Annoying stategy by the AI with actually threatening. If I wanted annoying, I'd play online and have some guy constantly talk about how teh ahwsum he iz 4 teh most bestest winn of uberness tuffguy go strategy.
*Drop of the Hat retreating: This is both interesting and annoying, I wouldn't expect a player to waste a small fleet by arbitrarily defending a colony against a swarm of Capitals and Cruisers, but the AI seems to flee in terror even when it still has the upper hand. Change the flee settings to be a little more difficult. Don't have them flee the moment their ship count dips below yours, that's just irritating. Maybe something closer to like 60% of your force strength before they consider bailing out. Even in a hopeless situation, you can attempt to take out a level 10 capital ship at the expense of a few cruisers, and what's lost can always be rebuilt.
*Seige frigate spam: This is fine early, but is there some way to make the AI ease off on the Seige friages, which wind up being a waste of Fleet Supply after about the 3hr mark into a game. Keeping a few makes sense, but I frequently find 10-20 trying to bomb my planets even with swarms of fighters there protecting it.
*Retarded build order and Priority: Instead of giving more difficult AI an unnatural resource bonus, how about give them some logic. They need more credits? Build more trade ports. Paramaters for AI defense structure place is iffy at best. This is painfully noticable in the Entrenchment expansion. A starbase on it's own is no match for a fleet, but put some Gauss or appropriate Advent/Vasari defenses around it, and repair stuctures, and you multiply it's defensive value. The AI also really doesn't like to upgrade it's starbases.
*Odd Fleet Composition: Probably leading to it's cowardly retreats, the AI's fleet composition seems to favore incredibly on Carriers and Support vessels, with Minimal use of heavy hitting vessels. This results in a painfully obvious weakness to be exploited. A swarm of Cobalts and Gardas ensure any enemy fleet dies, since every strike craft is blown away, and all the antimatter dependent support suicide with Sabotage reactors. Also, the light Carriers have a habit of thinking they're going to win by dying quickly or something, and often cheerfully chage into knife fight range.
*No Superweapons: Why doesn't the AI build these? It pretty much ensures victory on the players behalf once a Superweapon is up. The AI never seems to research that far. Even the passive civilian "Superweapons" like Insurgency.
*No Cheese: No, I'm not lactose intolerant, but one thing I hate doing is playing with Locked teams, as that obliterates one key aspect of SoaSE. However, it seems like during unlocked teams, there is still an unofficial Team, involving the AI versus your face. In that even at the very start of the game, the AI will happily dance and frollick together staging a massive attack just outside your homeworld. Was that intentional?
Okay, so there's the key problems I put against the otherwise, effective AI. Of coures, the grand argument will come "Play online isntead" to which I respond "Up yours, not everyone likes having D-bags brag about their teleetskillsdawg" A more respectable argument would be "Programming AI is hard, so blow off or do a better job yourself" to which I can only reply " (; 
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