I did open my crates Godgib, I got a whole bunch of head, torso, and leg parts, an emp fist, a shield, and a cluster rocket launcher.
Things are better now, I got another crate last night that had a grenade launcher and a missile launcher which has made things SIGNIFICANTLY better.
As far as strategy in PvP I've been doing early bloomwells and then going T2 as I drop a few factories and an armory. I've been captaining with Blink, so in the first skirmish I'll drop my piston Servo on one of their gunners and try to instagib it 
As for your last question, the AI wasn't much of an issue. I did my first round on easy, and the fact that the AI straight up sits there for several minutes at a time meant that I lost more units to the turrets that start on the map than their actual units. By the time the AI had hit T2 and built a decent army I was completely upgraded T3 with like 6/7 factories with a mixture of drones and just rolled over them. This game was on medium, but I had pretty good map control before the AI got set up and this began. It was little more than an endless line of drill drones with the enemy servos dotted throughout whenever they respawned just continuously pushing at one spot. I couldn't push back against it because I didn't have enough AoE to keep the drill drones from balling up on a servo and annihilating it, and the AI couldn't push through because I had a wall of turrets and beacons that could kill everything that came near it.
After a while I started sending drones around the long way between our bases to try and backdoor a way in, and they were killed off by getting stuck in a fight with the drones that had just spawned in the base until a servo spawned in to finish them off.
EDIT:
So after playing another Normal PvP and to another late game slog, I have several ideas to throw out for overcoming this. These may not apply to online play, as I still haven't been able to find a match yet, but this is what I've seen in offline.
1) Make Servos take longer to get a calldown in the higher tiers of tech. In this most recent game, I now had the AoE to kill drones without a whole lot of issue, but now I had a new problem. The enemy AI had two of the Juggernauts (I think that's what they're called, they are the huge ones with no head or shoulders but massive miniguns) and I could take them down if I unloaded all of my abilities on them without losing more than one servo usually. However, in the time it then took me to walk across the map and begin to push their base, at least one would be back, but my abilities weren't off cooldown, so I had absolutely no chance of killing them now. So I'd retreat, get my lost servos back and the drones, draw them out or wait for them to leave their turrets and it would happen again. I finally won by sending Reece in on suicide missions to convert and then destroy their bloom mines.
2) Make turrets either have less HP or deal less damage to Servos. Late game, everyone has turrets everywhere around their base. When you push an enemy base, you have your servos and your drones versus their servos, their drones, and their turrets. Because of how the game balances the numbers exactly, if you push, you do so at an inherit disadvantage. In my most recent game, the only way I could win a skirmish was to pour all my abilities on the Juggernauts because they have such a ridiculous amount of health. In a skirmish, that works, I win the battle. But I could never push their base because if I used my special attacks on the turrets to knock them out, I would be torn apart by the servos. They have too much health for you to quickly take care of them and then reengage the enemy servos, but they deal too much damage to simply ignore them.
3) Make turrets take up drone population. If you want to turtle, go ahead, but you do so at a lesser capacity to attack. In that game, I was constantly out and about so my turrets went pretty under-used and under utilized. If by not building them I could field more drones, that would help me in finally putting down an enemy that I had complete map control over.
