Slow Start

well if pirates are bothering you, either babysit the bidding process so you win and send the pirates at the AI's or turn them off (found in the game options screen when you start a single player game)

second, expand until you get to a choke point so that you have some income, Sins is a slow game so getting a choke point discovered and ready in 10 minutes is very difficult even for veterans, also as you expand make sure you are developing the planets a bit as an underdeveloped planet will cost you (they don't have to be fully developed, just enough to give you some credits)

As a new player, I have found it easiest at the start to just turn the pirates off.  Its one less thing to worry about and allows you to spend more time learning the controls and less time fighting for your life.  When you first start, the AI is enough to worry about.

I've come to respect the AI in this game a lot.  Even on Easy it provides a challenge to the new player, forcing them to learn and adapt.  Then, as you learn more, you up the difficulty.  I'm no expert at the game.  I'm still finishing my second game on Easy.  But, I'm now crushing the AI on easy and I am about to go up to Normal.  I may even turn the pirates back on in the near future.

New players should definitely play with pirates off.  Many people just don't like the feature anyways, and when you're learning it's just another detail you have to pay attention to.

Now, when getting started, your first priority is scouting.  You should already have every adjacent gravity well explored by the time your first capital ship is completed so it can immediately head towards one of them to clear out the militia.

As for defenses, you generally should avoid placing them unless you're reasonably confident that there will be a major battle at that planet.  Part of this involves scouting so you know how far away the enemy is.  If you're not in danger of being attacked, don't waste valuable cash on defenses that will go unused.  Generally you should look for good locations to build your defenses, places that act as staging grounds that you can use to launch offensives and counter-offensives.

You should not be setting up a choke point 10 minutes into the game unless the enemy's start location is dangerously close-by, which almost never happens on the randomly generated 1v1 maps.  You want to expand further and only set up choke points as you begin to approach the enemy.  For defenses, a good basic formation are two overlapping repair bays and a frigate factory.  Early on, that's all you really need.  With Entrenchment, putting up a well-placed starbase can be a great investment, but they're so expensive that you really have to put them in the right location.  Screw up your starbase placement and you're in for pain.

Haha, yeah I know what you mean, I've stopped playing other games for Runescape periodically before.

Anyways, besides pirates the biggest challenge for new players is always expansion. How fast you can expand and thus get your economy running in the first 10-20 minutes of the game (before you get attacked) is crucial (unless you are playing on a map with adjacent home worlds). If you are playing with quick start on, the first thing you need to do is get your scouts searching (possibly build a few more if you have a lot of phase lanes connected to your homeworld or you are playing on a large map), and build a capital ship (probably your colonizer) and a couple of light frigates. As soon as the capital ship is done, send it and any light frigates that are finished to the nearest asteroid (hopefully you'll have one nearby). You should destroy the siege frigate militia and colonize it a minute later.

Meanwhile, your scouts should give you an idea of what the map looks like and whether to start with the military tree or the civic tree. If you are close to your nearest enemy, always go with military. If you got a little space, and especially if there are a lot of nearby ice/volcanic planets, you can risk going civic. Either way, after developing your asteroid ASAP, you should build more light frigates (or LRMs if you can tech to them quick enough) and max out your starting fleet supply. That should be enough ships to take out the militia on any planet with your captial ship, so start collecting planets as fast as you can.

You should probably avoid any defensive structures early game unless you are getting rushed, which the easy
AI probably won't do. Just keep expanding until A. you have over half the colonize-able planets on the map or B. you can no longer expand easily (which will mean the only planets you can reach are enemy controlled).

On Easy, you learn quickly that the AI will still go for the juiciest planets (terran/desert) between you and it. just like you should.  Once you get a little experience under your belt you can pretty well predict exactly where the AI is going on Easy.  In my current game I anticipated the move and had already set up a Phase Jump inhibitor, trapping them and effectively ending that AIs chance at winning right there.  When you nuke two enemy caps that early you know its time for a higher difficulty.   Of course, that was a little longer in the game than ten minutes, but within the first half hour, I think.

One of the misconceptions I had to get over when I first started playing is the common RTS idea that you'll be wiped out in three minutes if you can't respond IMMEDIATELY to an AI strike.  In games like Starcraft and Warcraft that can easily happen.  Sins moves slower and it takes much longer to demolish a planet.  I think the key to avoiding early AI strikes is to be alert, be aware, and think about where you would attack if you were attacking you.  Maybe have stuff NEAR, but you don't have to have it "right there".  Heck, the Easy can be drawn into traps pretty easily by PURPOSELY not occupying a juicey world near your frontier.  A small fleet with your cap ship and a single repair platform can work wonders to repel enemy fleets in the first 30 minutes.

Another big error I made at the start was researching too much too quickly.  Your resources at the beginning of the game are most critical.  I took the advice I read here and even with my AI enemies three or four jumps away in a 1v1v1v1 I concentrated on civilian upgrades and only made the cheapest military upgrades, focusing on fleet construction instead. Light frigates are weak, but larger numbers of them with a cap ship at the beginning of the game can be quite potent.  You need to understand essential upgrades, which changes from game to game and will be very map dependent.  Why are you purchasing ice or volcanic upgrades if the nearest ice/vol planets are deep in enemy territory?  Even though I'm new, I think it makes sense that you may not purchase volcanic for quite some time especially, given that they have low population.  That is, of course, unless your next closest planet is volcanic.  Then definitely!

FAIL.

diplomacy includes both entrenchment and diplomacy. the only reason i could even see anyone ever playing entrenchment over diplomacy is if they were doing a many vs 1, and they did not want thier enemies pacting up... course the entrenchment ai is so second-rate compared to the diplomacy ai... so not quite sure what the point of fighting entrenchment ai is anyway...

I'm not really sure how your post is helpful pb.