Ok, not to hurt your feelings, but you have to start slow, take over a few planets at a time. Be sure to keep your research up as well, if you go carefully, you will be fine.

I think you are building your planetary defenses too early.  You need ot have a good fleet first and foremost.  Also take note of what ships the AI is building.  All ships are not created equal.  30 cobalts are not as menecing as 15 Assailants.

The AI recives a income boost vs player.

The ammount goes up as the AI is set on harder lvls.

Hard I belive is 1.5x vs player

They are more important early in the game since you can set them to explore and have them fill out the map for you.

Unfourtantly, even tho you can give them upgrades through the tech tree they quickly lose value as a game plays along. 

This is how I feel how the TEC play, 

As far as playing as TEC it tends to be quantity over quality.

Ship for ship, (with a couple of execptions) TEC is not as good vs the likes of Advent or Vassari ships of the same class or type. The military tree only has so-so upgrades for the TEC ships.

As for capital ships only one stands out, Marza. get it to a high enough level (6) and you may get accused of cheating.

For the rest well of the capital ships.

Early on captial ships are your work-horses. They do almost everything. But late game they tend to lose alot of value. When you have fleets of a couple hundred ships per going at it, your cap can be focused fired on and killed in a couple of seconds. This is very true in multiplayer since nobody wants to see a lvl 6 Marza and other players know how frustrating it is to see a lvl 6 cap ship evaporated. I usualy left a cap ship with a small fleet on fringe worlds to stop hostile culture and for defense. Armistice is particulary handy for buying time. I chose to have my main fleet engage first and have my caps engange afterwards, seperatly so I can control them more directly.

Buying XP is a waste of credits early on since there is a ton of XP to be had taking over worlds. And late game it is still a waste of credits.

For super weapons, the TEC had (arguably) the best one for a while. Its a "fire and forget" weapon. Leave it on and it becomes a "fire a regret". Its just straight up power, plain and simple.

As fas as economy and building are concidered, this is where the TEC standout.

Fully upgraded the TEC slash building costs to a fraction of thier original cost, can build structures faster, can build ships faster, can upgrade faster, can mine more, can earn more credits per planet, can reduce the ammount of credits recived by other players and can passivly cause insurections.   

I play the more "classic sins" so I cannot give you any adivce on the entrenchment since I am not playing beta.

Thats just my opinon tho, I would recomend finding SageWon's posts. he is much more experianced than me playing TEC. (you will know this just be reading his posts). Particulary read the "Need some advice as TEC" post and the "AI receiving unfair credit boost?" He goes into great detail. Also check out the "nube looking to play other nubes" post. You can find other multiplayer newbies like yourself.

Cobalt battle ball

SP takes ages - MP is much quicker. The main reason for that is that 1) humans know to quit as they are beat - CPU fights it out and 2) people can work together in MP.

Few tips (some have been stated above, but here goes anyway).

1) Don't bother building defenses early. You are wasting resouces. Until you are close to the enemy, they won't help you. And if the enemy gets to them later, you are already in trouble. Put that money into research etc...

2) When you start out, send out 2-3 scouts so you know which planets are the best to take. Roids are easy to colonise and can help you start to get some resources in (though little credits). And make sure that you can upgrade the planets before you take them - the -ve income you get can be a killer and is a noob mistake seen to often. It is better to clear a planet and wait a bit to get the credits/resources to upgrade it then to "own" it and have lower income. They only benefit to owning a planet early is if you lack the resouces to upgrade, but have the credits to start construction the mines AND still be able to do the upgrades when the credits arive. What I mean is having 1000 credits, 135 metal and 100 crystal and needing 150 metal to do the upgrade - you have the credits to start building the mines while those last 15 metal come in.

3) Capture neutral mines if possible to help

4) Build first free cap ASAP and start building ships

5) Work out which planet(s) to colonise once your scouts have revealed them. Some have more defenders then others, so go for the lightly defended ones while you build up your fleet

6) Get LRMS and carriers researched as soon as you can and into production - I don't fear 10-15 cobalts as much as I do 15 LRMS (more likely to kill my cap) or even 7-8 carriers with all fighters....

7) Get trade ports up - this is a advantage TEC have as it is lvl 2 tech vs 3 for advent and 4 for vassari.

8) Build more ships

thanks guys,

ok i quit my game that took 6 hr's i could see it wasnt going anywhere and started afresh on a 14planet 1v1 map and actually beat it easily and took about 2 hours!

the best tips are defiantly build miltary first and get as many planets as you can, i just built 10 frigates with the cap ship and easily took 5 planets.

i researched that fast ship with the missiles (LRMS?) and built those up and found that a whole bunch of them destroyed a cap ship pretty easily - the rest from there was a matter of building up civ and mil to take the map.

think i had 4 cap ships , around 40 LRMS and 20 Carriers by the end of it.

il probs do a bigger map next time and see how far i get.

Like a multi star map? Before you try you may want to lock teams before so the AI does not gang up on you. It sucks to find yourself 10 min into the game and find that the AI has allready made alliances with itself.

FYI, The logic of the AI dictates that it must be at war with at least one other player. So if all the AI make alliances with each other, you won't be able to make any at all. 

Its not "over powered" it just seems that way when you use it and clear out a 60+ ship fleet. The cause of which would be that the ships were underdevoloped, so you can destroy pirate swarms real easy with it.