I have been told that the AI for this game is suppose to be really good. Well, perhaps it is when it comes to economic and diplomatic AI, but not war AI. It feels like I am playing Civ 5 vanilla all over again, with incompetent passive AI that doesn't organize units into fleets properly and doesn't attack in any real force or in a organized way. So far I have destroyed almost 2 factions in my current game with ease and lost only 1 planet because it was undefended and a single enemy transport troopship was able to sneak into my empire.
I'm sorry, but once you realize how bad the AI is at waging war the game just becomes not that interesting anymore. Why should care about how awesome I am if the AI just sucks anyway?