I'm pretty sure Hard AIs do not gain any income advantage -- they just seem to spend it more effectively than we do because they have no sense of foresight or self-preservation.

Human player: "I'm gonna need X soon, so I won't get Y right now," when nine times out of ten you could afford X anyway.

AI player: "I don't even care, I'm just gonna research all the things, spam all the ships, and get all the planets."

But what makes an AI player ultimately beatable is their predictability. They will always attack when you're not at a planet (so leave choke-point planets only when you have adequate defenses), and they will inevitably attack with combinations of ships that can be beaten with proper fleet synergy.

Look at all the bitching in here.  If it's too hard, turn down the difficulty (you have more than 3 presets for a reason), or find what the issue is, and mod it out.

Problem solved.

On a side note, I haven't played the new AI yet, but I'll be happy to play once my mod is fully converted over.  The mod is tech level expansions, racial/planetary (making each race/planet more unique) rebalancing , dramatically increased importance on roletypes, and gameplay optimizations.  It's much harder than vanilla, and more fun.  I recall the standard difficulty being "unfair" for the AI, in my LAN group.  Regardless, I'm working on making our SupCom modset smaller while I wait for TSOP to get done.  Plus, I don't know how many more times they'll be patching Sins.  I don't want to be in the middle of working on something before they break it.

They do for sure. Just play the game for few minutes, then turn it off and check the difference in the planet income graph. You will see AI is getting 2,25x more income from planets than you do.

@WOEaintME>

i teached my  2 friends to play Rebellion, they never played Sins before. They are however RTS veterans, they played lot of CnC and Supreme Commander in the past and while Sins is different, it is not that much different. 

i played maybe one or 2 games with them against Normal. We did not even bother with Easy. I guess thats a difficulty for people, who never played RTS game before, or do not have anyone to explain things as they go (like they had me). After those 2 games, it was obvious the Normal was not a challenge anymore - i guess even them could beat multiple of Normals by themselves. So we simply had to move to Hard and the difference in difficultly is staggering.

After maybe 10-15 games we played, i think we won maybe half of them. The rest we had to restart as the AIs ganged up early game on one of us, he obviously had no chance due to AI superior numbers (thanks to income advantage every AI had about 2x more ships than him) and we could not really help him in time as we were too far away. In such situation the rest of us can technically kill one AI off, while they concentrate on him and try to win basically "last man standing" style. But that is not an option, if play together, we want to see the end of the game together.

Anyway I think we are getting better now and eventually we find a way to win consistently. But i played the game since last March and they are smart guys with experience playing RTS games, so they can learn pretty fast. I can however see not everyone is like them and can really have serious issue with Hard difficulty, to the point, where the frustration stops him from playing the game further. 

It sounds actually good, It would be surprising if you defeat Hard in the beginning with 100% succes rate.. Just look at  the name: Hard.

The way the AI acts in this game make it rather hard to really create AI that feels challenging but not too strong for newer players.

When it comes down to it, the AI is godawful at actually controlling & microing it's fleets(most notably it's ability use).  The result is that in a battle of comparably sized fleets between the AI and an actual player, the player has a pretty substantial advantage.

However as the game progresses, extra incomes makes less and less of a difference in fleet size(In longer games max fleet supply is the main constraining factor rather then resource acquisition).   

As a result the AI only really has a few ways of winning:

1).  Attack early when the AI economic cheat's have the greatest affect on fleet size.  

2).  Use early eco cheats to rush out superweapons or some other particularly powerful high tier tech faster then a newer human player can match paces with.

 3).  Establishing a huge enough economic advantage before the endgame that the war becomes a war of attrition the player won't win-  The AI is unlikely to do this against skilled players who know how to expand quick(faster then the AI ever does), build a strong eco, and take advantage of AI's tendency to throw fleets to their deaths on static defenses;  But for a newer player this is a very real threat especially on very large maps. That said, due to the above mentioned poor fleet control, this method of winning is likely the least reliable option the AI has; the kind of economic advantage it needs is the kind only really possible if the player themselves have a rather slow start- I only mention this third method because it is a very real possibility against newer players who usually haven't refined their start very much.

Those really are pretty much the only chances the computer has.  Which is unfortunate as those feel like some of the most one-sided ways to lose for a new player.  The sad fact of the matter is that the current AI just isn't smart enough to actually put up a good fight in what most newer players consider a fair fight.  The AI needs the crutch of being able to hit the player before they are ready and easily recoup losses to really pose any challenge.

I played a few 4 player ffa's with the AI.  it was harder but i did win 2 games with TEC and Advent rebels (I lost with the loyalist versions of each race).  part of it just seems like luck of the draw based on how the AI's ally and if you make an AI friend in your game.  If i get into a 2 front war, it's over.

Sully, you have here by been deemed a cry baby!!