A little help??

[Wolverine]

From my experience, the most important early game tactic is to isolate your home system from enemies as quick as possible. Scout the map and lay mines at any appropriate bottleneck warp points between you and your enemies.

From your shielded base of operations you can expand/conquer then repeat the process of mining bottlenecks.

This only works early on, until the AI builds up powerful Mine Sweepers, but given enough time to research tech and build up safely, any semi-competent human can outsmart the AI.