There seems to be a bug where the difficulty is not set to the overall level correctly, and unfortunately there's no way to set the levels of the AIs individually in the campaign. Hopefully this is on the list for 1.3, which will be released in beta tomorrow, hopefully.

What difficulty level are you playing on and how far into the level are you? The AI sometimes makes unarmed ships to prevent transport rushing, and they don't update their ship designs that often, at least when compared to human opponents.

Hmm im now up to appocalypse and still havent had many problems. Sure the dreadlords have big guns but they dont seem to use defence so i just swarm em under with 10x their number of heavy fighters. One thing that bothers me is that my allies are completely useless. i colonise all the planets before they even get around to building colony ships. Without rush buying as well. Im playing on tough btw.

Yep i had no problems. Managed to get every single planet except for one the yor colonised next to their home and of course my allies starting planets and the dread lords home. the dread lords ships vs my HF-305's (smalls with 5 beam attack 4 movement) beat them 1v1 and even 3v1 but i had fleets of 5 running around wiping out DL frigates and only losing 2. Even the battleships only beat 1 fleet before been taken down by the second. My ships were dirt cheap so i had heaps of them. I have to say the ammount of starting money you have is just ridiculous. ANd the drengin and yor? Dont make me laugh they were just plain pathetic. I sent two fleets after the drengin and two after the yor and that was that. I had it set on tough btw so it wasnt just an easy difficulty.

[EDIT] Okay i tried it again and this time im no longer starting with 15k cash only 5k. Maybe the difficulty bug was why it was so easy.

Um 22 attack? Cripes the frigates im facing have 5 movement and like 140 attack. The battleships have over 300! i work on the assumption there is no way any of my ships will survive a single hit.

Gah something weird happened. I must have deleted the wrong savegame so i had to go back to 'rising. Hehe almost finished siege again. I conquered the DL planet by rushing it with plasma armed light fighters and several transports! Whoa boy talk about a powerhouse.

All i can say is, oh my god the carnage... Whoa apocalypse is a tough one on er, tough lol. Just a continual meat grinder which you feed ships into untill a DL battleship sneaks past and wipes out all your starbases . Must have taken me at least 7 hours to finish. Good work by the devs! The DL ships are still badly configured though and none of them use defense except for their "escort" class ships. This means they can only be beaten by swarms of light fighters as theres no way I can build a ship to stand up to 300 attack. I was just reading the game example of apocalypse and In that the dreadlords were much more balanced and probably a lot harder. I want the old dreadlords back!