The campaign may be easier if you play it on a higher difficulty level. When the AIs aren't penalized so much, they'll be able to put up a stronger fight against the dreadlords, so you won't have to do all the work yourself.

The trick to beating the dreadlords in a fight is to understand how the combat system works. No matter how much attack power a ship has, it can only shoot one enemy each round. Since dreadlord ships have a ton of attack power, they'll crush one of your ships with each shot, no matter what kind of ship you send against them. So use big fleets of tiny ships with no defense. A tiny ship will die each round, but you'll have a lot more ships to return fire, and it will take many rounds for one dreadlord to wipe out an entire fleet. You really don't have to tech up much at all to win against the dreadlords.