Ok, so I have been playing for almost a week and patting myself about how awesome I am at defeating the horribly weak AI even on HARD! That is right I am the man!! (kidding of course) Anyway, so I am playing the huge random map with 10 players. I dominate my local star and am well on my way to being master of all survey....
OOOPS
How do you assault into the other star systems? Ok, so I held my my star killing most comers and am ready to go to the next system while defending my home system with defenses and a few frigates scattered about. I am allied with one nation, there are 4 enemy nations, and 4 dead nations.
So, I head off to the next star and fight a battle there kicking tail of course. However, here is where I unravel. I take my armada and start blasting enemy planets(like a big raid) in an effort to stop there production, etc. Here is where I go wrong. I should have broken off a smaller fleet to conquer a few worlds and use my large fleet to hold the bottle necks. Instead, as I run around with one fleet, I am losing ships slowely, but I can't replace them because the other 3 enemies are all over my home star!
What I have learned:
I should have attempted to hold planets with a smaller fleet while my main fleet defeated all comers. I could have done this because 3 planets were easily blocked from the main group of planets of this particular star. Something I didn't think of until my home star was in serious trouble and my armada was pretty cut-off and cut-up.
So, yes I was over confident and I learned something. However, I do have a question. Towards the middle stages to late stages will raids slow an enemy's production or are resources so stock piled that as long as they have one planet they can still produce like they have 10?
I turned those 3 planets into ghost towns, but his fleets seemed to get larger and the stockpile seemed to be the only angle he had. This is not a critique of the resources in the game, I am just curious if they AI gets the same kind of stockpiles as I seem to have (even though they are forced to build a lot more ships because I blew theirs' up!

Anyway, love the game and I will not think I am the greatest space empire guy of all time.....for a couple of days at least!
great game