Economist TEC, Researcher Vasari/Advent should be pretty tough.

Yup, multiplayer sure is challenging. What with dodging minidumps, fiddling with your router, searching for allies who aren't worthless, dealing with people who drop at the first sign of trouble or go AFK randomly halfway through the game, and of course the inability to pause, speed the game up, or realistically save (yeah you can but good luck getting everyone back together to load it) I'm surprised anyone manages at all.

Of course that has nothing to do with the original post at all so I don't know why you bothered.

Anyway I find economist (I think) to be the easiest. If that's the one I'm thinking of they tend to spam lots and lots of light frigates which are easy to counter.

Defender might be easy too, though I can't say I've ever picked it so I don't know for sure. Assuming that means they use most of their ships defending, they will have less to attack with and that could be useful when going up against multiple enemies. That's just theory though.