Some strategies and tactics work against the AI better than others, and all of us have wildly different strategies. For myself, I've had games where I got into a 3-way war on turn 4 (Had my 3 starting planets each in a system with a different race) and within a very short time had all three at my mercy even with them having a low bonus.
I just started a game Last night with the AI on low bonus, high difficulty, and I began with fewer race points than each of them. On turn 1 I was in 4th place out of 4. By turn 3 I was in first. By turn 15 I was over twice the score of the second place AI.
Now, some of those early differences are attributed to little things, like knowing when building different sorts of facilities on a world to build research facilities before resource harvesting because you have a surplus of resources at the beginning. The AI doesn't know this, so I get maybe 5 or more extra turns of research over him if we build the exact same number and type of facilities. When multiple worlds begin in the same system, the AI isn't smart enough to scrap the surplus space ports and recycling centers, so I get 2 extra facility spaces on my homeworlds that it doesn't get. Not to mention the resource bonus for scrapping those rather expensive buildings.
If you know when to time these things, and how to take advantage of the AI's weaknesses, it is essentially helpless. If you don't know the tricks, then it is actually quite a good opponent. I'd rank it as an intermediate-level player. Beginners will have a lot of trouble with it, and intermediate players will or won't based on how their particular strategies match up against its strategies (and wheter or not they do the missile-dance in tactical combat). But advanced players know all the weaknesses to exploit in its behavior.
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