Shameless bump

I found the Dread Lords campaign to be easy as well, even at high difficulty.

I hear ya! Playing the "Dread Lords on Parade" scenario, I noticed that the best way to deal with Dread Lords was by sending wave after wave after wave of my men in vast fleets of tiny ships with evil weapons and lots of speed. It's pathetic that the Dread Lords don't get any HP advantage. Since they can only target one ship at a time, they eradicate one of my fighters, the rest of the fleet opens fire on the Dread Lord. Scrawny little fighters are so much cheaper than Dread Lord ships. And invading their planets isn't that tough. People are, after all, a renewable resource. Dread Lords are not.

It's all luck of the draw. On the campaign, I have also encountered scenarios where the DL got lucky and got a defense and logistics techs from taking over planets. It's game over after that. No way anyone can go up against 4x 30hp/400atk/150def frigates. I have had that happen to me on at least 2 scenarios during my campaign (but luckily both times I was on the verge of blitzing the last DL planet by that point). Beware of what you wish for.

I got lucky in the campaign during that darn hard scenario, somewhere halftrough. Forgot the name, but I'm sure you know which one I mean. When I captured a Dread Lord planet I got the third best laser in the game. With that, I was able to build ships that could match the DL's ones. I researched up the logistics tree and the warpdrive tree and was able to make fleets with lots of lasers on lots of medium hull very fast ships. With that I was able to kick their buts. After that my luck ran out, because when I was building an invasion fleet, the DL's used a new tactic: in stead of sending one quite strong ship against a fleet of mine, they began making fleets too! That had me running for cover.

Now that I was on the defense, I had incoming troop transports. So I build super fast ships, with which I could blow up those unescorted transports. However, I had to research better planetary defense as I couldn't stop them all. When I had that covered I began a war of artrition: the DL's need a HUGE economy to run their empire, so I just sended a large number of very fast troop transports to conquer and demolish one of their planets, let them take it back, while having gained some nice technology in the process. That way, I insured that every ship that I destroyed, stayed away, because they didn't had the resources to rebuild it. After a while I was technologically advanced enough to match their ships one-on-one and that's how I could win. Needless to say that it took me a week or so to finish that scenario. But it was fun !

I got VERY lucky on one of those scenarios and stole the Black Hole Gun technology  Then I just packed it onto Cargo Hulls (1 shot from the Dread Lord ships will obliberate my strongest Dreadnought, and its faster and more efficient to build Cargo Hulls than Huge Hulls when both have the same mortality rates), along with engines and logistics, and crushed them.

Different people have differing degrees of success with the Dread Lords. Sometimes, it actually is tougher when you turn the difficulty down, because then your allies can't help you.

You people are lucky.
I abandonded my DL campaign several times after DL ships in the middle of game decided they need some ship defendes and got 16-50 in defense which made it game over for me.

P.S.
Normally, onlt tiny ships win against DL, but if they put defenses it *is* game over regardless what you have.