I suck at this game too. 2 hours, I'm dead, on a small random map with pirates. I keep reading that the AI is stupid and too easy, but on normal difficulty the single opponent is building 3 or 4 times as many ships as me.
I don't have the resources to build the ships they have. They have cruisers in the first 10 minutes of the game, and I don't get them until an hour in, if I'm lucky. They attack with 40 or 50 ships, and I don't have that many in my whole fleet. With 14 planets to split, I get 5 and the AI gets 9.
Between the constant pirate raids that seem to hurt me and not the AI, and the giant rushes of AI ships, I get nowhere.
The screwy thing is, if I set the opponent to easy, it's a cakewalk. There's no challenge at all. Normal is beyond me.
Right now, I'm not that happy with the learning curve of this game. It goes from boring easy to impossible so quickly I can't keep up.