What bothers me more than anything is there's no way to get the AI to build huge numbers of caps. The AI had enough resources to build a full complement, but settled on two. Why?
A lot of this wasn't a problem pre Entrenchment. I still have Sins 1.05 tucked away on my comp and that is more challenging, the AI on unfair often building 6 caps and spamming frigates.
With Entrenchment the AI gets so far, then starts building starbases and gives up the fight.
Last night I modded the gamplay file to read:
table-Aggressive
BuildShip 30
BuildModuleTactical 2
BuildModuleCivilian 1
BuildModuleResearch 1
UpgradeResearch 2
UpgradePlanetArtifactLevel 1
UpgradePlanetPopulation 1
UpgradePlanetInfastructure 1
MaxBountyBidCount 5
UpgradeStarBase 1
table-Defensive
BuildShip 25
BuildModuleTactical 5
BuildModuleCivilian 1
BuildModuleResearch 1
UpgradeResearch 2
UpgradePlanetArtifactLevel 1
UpgradePlanetPopulation 1
UpgradePlanetInfastructure 3
MaxBountyBidCount 5
UpgradeStarBase 3
table-Research
BuildShip 25
BuildModuleTactical 2
BuildModuleCivilian 2
BuildModuleResearch 2
UpgradeResearch 5
UpgradePlanetArtifactLevel 2
UpgradePlanetPopulation 1
UpgradePlanetInfastructure 2
MaxBountyBidCount 10
UpgradeStarBase 2
table-Economic
BuildShip 25
BuildModuleTactical 2
BuildModuleCivilian 5
BuildModuleResearch 1
UpgradeResearch 2
UpgradePlanetArtifactLevel 2
UpgradePlanetPopulation 5
UpgradePlanetInfastructure 2
MaxBountyBidCount 15
UpgradeStarBase 1
That is, increased the BuildShip from 10 to 30, or 5 to 25. On a small random the AI gathered 220 frigates to my 100, but still only one cap to my dozen. The battle didn't last long...
I don't know what the maximum levels on these are, so I'll keep playing. Maybe try upping Research to see what that does.
I wish I could learn more about this kind of stuff and what each item does 
