First of all, the deliverance engine is considered the worst "superweapon" in the game, especially without the slight bonus it got in the expansions. Teching up is usually good, but you really shouldn't be going that far of the civilian tree if you are at a military disadvantage.

Otherwise, I need more information on what kind of ships you built before I can really tell you what you are doing wrong with the Advent themselves. From your post it just sounds like you aren't quite managing your resources effectively enough as (depending on the level of the AI) you shouldn't be that far behind even if he had 9 planets (and I'm assuming some of these were uncolonizeable gravity wells). Even then, when used right the Advent can get simply amazing fleets that can decimate massive numbers of TEC ships even when significantly underguned, though maybe not quite a 550:1650 ratio.

You got it.  This is your top priority; the first 30 minutes of the game are by far the most important.  Usually the majority of the map is colonized by this point, so you have to make sure you get to any important planets within the first 30 minutes. 

You really need to have at least half the solar system under your command to have a fair shot at winning.  You can scrape by with a 6:8 planet ratio on a map like this, but with a 5:9 ratio you're in for serious pain.  The longer you wait, the bigger his advantage grows.  The moral is that if you have fewer planets than the enemy, you need to be on the offensive. 

The problem you have is that the map stabilized with his empire nearly twice as large as your's.  The game then went on for hours, and the longer a game draws out, the more advantaged the bigger empire is.  Early on, the big empire your opponent had wasn't a huge advantage.  But after two or three hours, it became a massive advantage.

As an aside, five planets should take you no more than 15 minutes to acquire.

After 3.5 hours you can have pretty much anything.  A deliverance was probably a poor use of money here, and making your fleet bigger to compete would have been a better expenditure.  Moreover, a 5-planet empire is not big enough to justify more than 3 civic labs or more than 5 military labs.  There are a couple of situations where you might add an extra lab to get a tech you want, but for such a small empire high-level techs are just too expensive and don't pay off well enough.  Aside from unlocking important structures and units, you shouldn't be doing very much research at all with a tiny empire like that.

Well, there's a lot of room for improvement.  I posted an Entrenchment replay a while ago for a player who was having similar problems to you.  In that game, I colonized seven planets in the time it took the unfair AI to colonize two.  You don't need to be that fast, particularly for the lower difficulty AI's, but it underscores the point that the AI isn't that amazing at all, and once you learn a few tricks you'll be running circles around it.

Having a significant bigger empire means that in the long run you're going to win.  If your enemy has a bigger empire than you, you need to be attacking to try to change that.  If the enemy maintains a substantially bigger empire than you for 30 minutes or so, you're probably going to lose. 

With Advent, you should probably lead with either the Halcyon carrier or the Progenitor mothership capital ships.  The Halcyon is a more aggressive choice, perfect for early battles, and the mothership a more defensive choice for nurturing an empire and supporting a larger mid-game fleet.  In either case, these two capital ships work great together and it's often a good idea to have both.  If you choose mothership first, get the carrier second, and if you chose carrier first, get the mothership second.

Your top priority is to scout.  Find out the lay of the solar system and plan out your colonization route.  You don't need to send all your units in one direction, and often sending multiple groups to colonize different planets is effective.  Planets with 5 or fewer militia can be suppressed with frigates alone (6-8 disciples will do the trick).  Send your capital ship to deal with the better defended planets.  Sometimes planets with particularly heavy militia aren't worth your time.  You can skip them (easy with a mothership, since it can colonize on its own and you don't need to sneak a colony frigate past) and colonize them later when time and opportunity allows.

Maintain a strong pace, and try to keep in mind when you will meet your opponent.  You should build a frigate factory near the front line and start pumping units before a fight breaks out.  Repair platforms near the front lines are a good idea, both as defenses and a place to fall back to if you need to retreat.  The illuminator vessels is a great staple unit for your fleet, and combining it with the Iconus Guardian (you'll need a progenitor with the shield restore ability to use them effectively) for defense you can have a very deadly fleet indeed.

Are you playing against an unfair AI?  I can see a newb getting crushed against an unfair AI like you describe, but I crushed the AI on normal difficulty on my very first game of Sins, without even knowing what I was doing.  My guess is you have the difficulty bumped up to unfair or more?  Make sure you tone it down to normal until you know what you are doing.  And turn pirates off.

High difficulty would explain why the AI had so many more ships.

I agree, Darvin.  Everyone's mind works differently.  Some people have a mind that just understands how to work a strategy, some poeple need time to learn it.  THere is no true way to explain the game to everyone.

Oh, and thanks for the link to the ship stats and whatnot.   I'll start working on the new stat thread tomorrow.

-Twilight Storm

Well, we're going to need more facts to understand how your enemy got that many ships.  Specifically, what was the rough timeline of the game, and what was your income relative to the AI's, what were you spending your money on?  I can't help but think there's something you're missing here, but without further details it's very hard for me to speculate since there are a lot of minuitae in this game.

If you can't beat the easy AI by sheer numerical advantage, it means you're still too slow with your economy and in fielding your fleet.  Your colonization seems to fast enough, but for some reason your economy and fleet size is lagging behind.   Now, colonizing planets does have a short-term downside.  The infrastructure costs can really add up as your colonize additional planets.  However, even in a worst-case scenario this would only be an advantage of 20-30 frigates for the enemy, and this advantage is very temporary, perhaps only a 5-10 minute window of opportunity before your planets are churning profits.

I might be able to swing a replay for you (a little tough since my gaming computer is out of commission) that could be helpful for learning the ropes.

What you could do is to post a replay, then it would be easier to offer guidance.  The replay of your last game should be in Documents and Settings/....../Sins.../AutoRecord-SinglePlayer.  Upload that somewhere and post the link here.

The problem with the patches is that the replays are invalidated so there has to be a new 'how to' replay every patch.  Perhaps we should keep a replay thread up-to-date for this purpose, as there seem to be a few of these requests.  Are there a number of beginners who would find single player replays useful?

Unless there is a bug with easy difficulty, which isn't something that experienced players would notice, you shouldn't have problems with the AI unless you make them yourself.  However, you should never be surprised by a couple of hundred ships, thats a fairly basic error in any RTS!

No, the replay is a .record file... something like AutoRecord-0xxxxxxx.record  Not the cache folder, the AutoRecord- SinglePlayer folder.

I did a search and looked in every folder, I don't have that file anywhere.

The x's stand for numbers... I can't tell you what the numbers will be.  If you have autorecord turned off you won't have any replays, turn it on next time you play.

For XP the full path to any replays is Documents and Settings/[your name]/Local Settings/ApplicationData/Ironclad Games/Sins of a Solar Empire/AutoRecord-Single Player  That's also where you would put Darvin's replay. You may need to show hidden folders to be able to see the Local Settings folder, in XP that's selectable from 'Tools' and 'Folder Options'.

If when you try to 'Watch' replays when you select AutoRecord Single Player it is empty, you don't have any replays.

Here's another advent versus TEC. This is a 1v1 small random against a normal AI. Enjoy.

http://www.filefront.com/15978853/1v1-Vanilla-MedRand-Normal.record

Yeah, try to locate the earliest replay of this game.  It's not often there are no ice planets at all, so this map was odd, but you shouldn't allow metal stocks to build up to 7000...  When you sell and buy, make sure to sell high and buy low on the market, however you should only need to have stocks of slightly more than 1000 metal to be able to sell at the right price.

As you had many volcanics, you should have researched metal upgrades, they would have been valuable for you.  Also, this was a single star map, you don't need the distance jump upgrade, thats for multi-stars and jumps from star to star.  I'd also consider the terran planet upgrade, its not expensive.

The enemy fleet was based on Kodiaks, carriers and bombers are a good counter, Guardians and Repulse are also strong, and even better than carriers if you have enough of them plus enough combat power to make use of the opportunities they give you.

That far into the game Advent need their armour upgrades and you just have to make the sacrifices necessary to get them.  Add logistic slots and more trade ports to your planets.  To afford them.

However your most basic difficulty was combat sense.  Do not jump your entire fleet to a roid you haven't scouted.  Withdraw when outnumbered.  If you have spent money on defences, fight behind them.  When you have the enemy trapped unable to jump, focus fire his ships one-by-one with your fleet to ensure that you destroy and not just damage.  When in combat, allocate your ships to their best target... your Disciples would have been useful to quickly eliminate his carriers and win the strikecraft battle, had you any carriers to follow up.  The abilities on your capitals have to be switched off so you can cast them when to need them. 

You lost that entire fleet though you had several opportunities to retreat unscathed because of the AI's dubious use of Armistice.  With the AI you also want to move its main fleet around to defend against your raids, and then take advantage to attack where it is not.  If the enemy moves a lot it drains the antimatter from their ships, don't let it remain stationary and then attack it where it is.  Your priority is not to lose ships, always ensure that your retreat is open, don't go too far into a contested gravwell, make the destruction of jump inhibitors your first priority.  You have to control your fleet much more in battles.

Until you lost that last battle that game was still winnable, but you just can't risk losing entire fleets.  There was no reason to fight there, at that time.

I watched your replay. How did you start with "quick start" enabled on a vanilla game with a random small map?