The problem is the way the game calculates strength: it puts too much emphasis on CURRENT military strength and not enough emphasis on POTENTIAL military strength.
For example, the AI with a ton of ships (because of Malevolent Lvl 5 Free Overlord Ship) will think a human with ZERO military ships is a pushover. Unfortunately, the human is on twice as many colonies as the AI with twice the productive power and twice the military technology.
So the AI declares war on the human and 6 turns later realizes it made a DRAMATIC mistake and makes peace.
If the AI could leverage its initial military advantage and capture a bunch of the human's worlds on the first turn of war that wouldn't be as big of a problem. But the AI is incapable of preparing for war so it spends 10-20 turns dithering and doing nothing, giving the human more than enough time to churn out UNSTOPPABLE FLEETS OF DEATH that is two or three tech levels ahead of whatever the AI has. The AI seriously needs to PREPARE for war BEFORE going to war.
At least the AI in Vid's mod is balling up its fleets into maxed out balls and killing shipyards and starbases. Now the AI needs work on general strategy and putting more engines on its ships so it can move faster than 6 moves at a time.