Pirates usually give new players a hard time.  Luckily, they can be disabled, and many players turn them off.  The enemy AI difficulty setting can also be set before the game begins; simply left- or right-click the little chevron button next to the AI team selector (you'll also see a question mark there, that determines how the AI plays the game).  Set the AI to easy for the first couple games, and as long as the pirates are disabled, you'll find that the AI fairly tame.  There are also predesigned maps that will get you fighting your opponent faster than a random map, like Point Blank or Quickstrike. 

I tend to play defensively as well, though in this game the importance of defense is determined by the number of choke points in the map.  It's not uncommon for small maps to have a single choke point between the two factions; seize this world and fortify it, and the AI will never be able to beat you, at least on Hard (my standard setting).  While your scouts are off exploring the system, have your first capital ship and a small supporting fleet run around and kill militia on colonizable worlds.  If your first ship is a mothership (capital ship that can colonize, always my first choice in a random map) you'll get a bit of an edge on your economy, both due to the bonus the capital ship's colonize ability provides and from taking less time to take a planet than a colony frigate would.  It's important to expand fairly aggressively in the beginning of the game, so that you can keep up economically with your enemies.  Once you've got a few worlds under your control and have found all the choke points on the map, head to them and capture them.  Congratulations!  If you're able to keep ahold of these choke points with no enemy worlds behind it, you have now won.  I'm sure you will get a lot more advice from people a lot more skilled than I, but the above is my normal play style, and it's working like a charm for me.

If you looked up anything about this game, you'd find it has a learning curve. You're going to lose at first, don't take it personally. The game really is a lot of fun, even for single players once you know what you're doing.

The first thing you need to go is just play through a whole game, getting some first hand experience with the tech trees and unit types. Yes the pirates will make that a pain, leave them off until you're comfortable, and in fact most people have them off all the time. You may find it easier to do on this map as well, its set up so that the AI will never be able to attack you, and if you take the time to go through every planet you'll encounter almost every unit in the game. You may want to leave the pirates on as a source of combat experience in this case. To play it, put it in your My Games -> Ironclad Games -> SoaSE:R -> GalaxyForge folder.

There are three major mistakes newbs tend to make (all of which deal with game pacing, which is something you just have to learn with practice), not expanding fast enough, building too many capitalships, and researching too many trivial techs early on. More details in this thread, you might find it helpful if you're doing any of those things.

Ah yes, this was my entry to Sins as well. The good news is, once you get a basic build order down there will be no spam. You will have to build a steady stream of units and send them to your choke points, but that's mostly in the early game while you're building up your economy. After this initial phase, the tech tree starts to become very important and you can kill AI ships at a 2:1 or 3:1 ratio without even microing.

Bounty is not the most effective thing to spend money on when you're starting, every spare credit should go instead to colonization, planetary population upgrades, trade ports, or buying the metal/crystal you need for those things. Let the pirates come for you and have just enough ships ready that you can destroy them. This will level up your cap ships, which has a huge effect on their survivability. Once you have 3-4 capships at level 4+ and a titan, you can start laying waste.

Or you can do something completely different. I'm sure the MP people out there have more effective strategies than that. But overall, if you enjoy SC:FA and playing defensively then this is actually one of the best SP RTS games out there.

If you were playing against the TEC faction, they do in fact get a resource bonus for everything you buy as a tier 8 technology, but you won't see that until the late game.  Beyond that, no AI below Hard get any bonuses.

If you're still playing defensively, I recommend playing as the TEC loyalists while you get a hang of the game.  They are specifically designed for turtling strategies, and are extremely difficult for the AI to make a dent against.

I want to clarify that on the harder difficulties, Im not sure on the lower difficulites. The AI in Rebellion will use scouts to counter mines. Ive seen them many of times jump in scouts(sometimes 20+, which is overkill IMHO) before their fleet and then proceed to clear a path as they charge their target.

Its not 100% perfect but its not like in Entrechment. Where you could mine phase lanes and watch them plow through them with out a second thought. 

So, dont expect mines to be as effect as they have been. They still help but like Starbases and other defensive structures, they AI will hit them hard. If you playing against the TEC, you can be sure your lose all your repair bays first. 

Really, the only way to truly get good at the game is to either play multiplayer (extremely irritating for a beginner) or just keep hiking the difficulty on the AI.

Starbases are absolutely essential for a turtler.  Get them and get them fast (15 minutes max).  if you just want to whale on the AI, i would recommend downloading the distant stars mod.  Its an enhancement mod for the base game that smooths out the game, beefs up the effects, adds a few new defense platforms, dramatically increases the usefulness of the tech tree, (its quite possible to end up with a kol battleship doing upwards of 1000 dps with 10000 hp) and beefs up the pirates with capital ships and upgraded weapons, making buying them off a very doable winning strategy.

(Carbon, i'm not being your personal advertising service, i just really like the mod)

Adieu

Wow, don't be like that man...

I've done that before too.  Actually, i think that anyone who relishes fireworks has done this at one time or another.  Some people aren't like "Oh, i have a bigger fleet than they do, i'm gonna go crush them right now".  Some people actually enjoy overkill if you can believe it!

I bought the game with rebellion with the urging of my friends on the steam sale.  I'm having problems right now in a game on the second highest difficulty 1v1 as Vasari Rebel against TEC loyalist.  Once I finish researching all the techs I need can I just blow up my research labs and keep the techs my friends tell me some of the techs go away but I don't know which ones or if this is true or not.  Basically what I'm asking is should I blow them all up and replace with culture/trade buildings?

Put another way, if you researched everything then scuttled your labs, you'd keep your extra hit points, damage, resource and trade income etc. You'd lose the ability to build anything but caps, light frigates, scouts and colony ships, and any unlocked abilities won't be useable, even on your already built ships. Superweapons also won't fire.

there is something for effectiveness on the wiki, yes.  If you want to see fleets, just ask a pro for a replay of one of his/her games.