Okay, is it just me or are the Altairians the worst allies ever?

I've played on several different difficulty settings, and in the first scenario alone they're only not an obstacle on the lowest settings. On the higher settings, they beat me to colonizing the central system on the map, and then they sit around and build starbases around my homeworld and otherwise ignore the Drengin, and the Drengin ignore them.

Okay, why are teammates (in an unbreakable alliance) building influence starbases around my homeworld at challenging difficulty in the first place? Is there some reason that they need to overwhelm my influence rather than build up to fight the Drengin?

It's not just the first mission that the AI is a pain, but that is the one I've messed with most.

I don't mind the enemy AI behavior. Fighting the Dread Lords is a pain but doable, but the ally behavior is just driving me up the wall.