I just played a medium game on "Easy" AI to see if they were improved from the beta.

Well, I put "Easy" in scare quotes for a reason. I managed to get three planets (two of them asteroids) before being hit with multi-pronged attacks everywhere from various factions.

It seems that part of this has to do with factional allegiance. The missions were doable..but I was given them way too early, and with a extremely small time limit. That would have only given me 25% influence, as well, not enough to ally with anyone.

So what happened was that the AI picked up at least one ally and me, with absolutely zero space friends, got decimated within about a half hour (not long for this game!). I realize part of this was playing on a small map (one star, five players) but it seems a bit difficult to get any allies with AI players when they'd rather just cheat and wipe you out. I wasn't aware the technological singularity hit yet..or maybe I just suck