Excess amounts of resources and trouble finding a challenge

win sooner.

play online.

Bump up the AI difficulty and be more aggressive with your strategy. You will find that as you bump up the AI difficulty you get less 'down-time' and your fleet composition and position choices begin to mean a lot more. That being said, I suggest hopping online and seeing some of the strategies that are employed there. Often it is not a FFA but ends up being a 3v3, 4v4, or 5v5.

It's the FFA setting.... Make teams, and then you will see some large fleets, within 2 hours for sure.

Have fun, and welcome to the game

The normal AI is a joke, trying playing on a harder difficulty settings - I'd suggest a minimum of hard or unfair. At that level the AI is still a joke, but a joke with truck loads of credits. On these difficulty settings learn how to be aggressive, how to colonise quickly (i.e. using lone colony frigates with static defence platforms), how to make an economy quickly and indeed how to make a fleet quickly.

Anything more advanced than these basics cannot be learnt offline. Make the jump once you are ready - preferably sooner rather than later so you don't learn bad habits. The online game is more dynamic - suddenly fleet choices, strategy and advanced tactics matter. If it is a challenge you are after fear not, you are sure to be defeated resoundingly the first time you play somebody experienced online. 

Not so sure about this one really but if you're up for a SC2 style click fest then sure. Advanced tactics such as flanking, decoying, macro and micro managing your ships and their abilities as well as fleet composition and what goes where can be had on larger maps with harder AI opponents (to a point). Online offers some of this but at the fastest game setting more often then not.

SivCorp is right as well about setting teams at least 2 AI on a team for starters). You will see them start to attack your planets from different locations, trying to draw off your fleet from one planet to another and when you jump, the other AI swoops in to attack the planet you just left, etc etc. You can see this on longer games with FFA though the alliances there are more fragile. A good suggestion is to start some AI on teams with each other but leave the teams unlocked.

play online, 5 hours is a long time to be playing against a normal ai, not trying to stamp out your fire, but acting like thats it and such, theres more to the game, you may be good but if it takes you 5 hours, then all you need to work on is speed.. and online games as mentioned are generally the fastest, or the longest depending on stalemates

Well yes of course the tactics aren't on the level that you'd see in SC2 - but SC2 could be quite accurately reclassified as real time tactics. However, despite the fact that tactics are not the focus of sins I have certainly been beaten in the past by  better players based on superior tactics. Certainly if you are a front liner with a paucity of ships and planets you have time to micro a great deal more - and indeed you are wise to, since each ship can mean so much in those situations. Certainly I'd rather be the player that can use more advanced tactics at will should I need to.

I find your comment about fleet composition odd, the choice of ships you use is one of the key determinants in victory online.

I enjoyed an eye opening defeat against some AIs after ramping the difficulties to a mix of unfair and vicious. I made teams too, with this break down:

My team: Myself and one vicious AI

Team 2: 3 unfair, one vicious

Team 3: same as 2.

Team 4: 2 vicious AI

Admittedly an over expectation of my skilzzz but it was fun to see that the AI would roflstomp me with a giant two titan AI fleet, my poor starbases ;( 

TL;DR = Up the AI until they face stomp you.

The point I was trying to make is that on easier AI settings you can get away with spamming one or two types of units and not worry so much about the individual fleet makup and the tactics that are available because of this. When you ramp up the difficulty setting it forces you to consider your fleet make-up (again, to a point) more carefully and often makes it harder to spam one or two ships. Because of this you need to consider more advanced tactics, an understanding of dps, anti-matter usages from abilities etc.

Playing against a real person, regardless of the game settings is the ultimate test of these skills.

AM is only consideration on caps.  And most people will not leave multiple abilities on a cap on autocast for this reason.  In case of support frigates, they tend to die before extinguishing their AM anyway, so just build more.

5 hours is a really long game.  You can have incomes exceeding 1k a second in that time.

An Excessive amount of resources means you are having a macro problem. Which means you a) need to build more expensive units or b) build more frigate factories.

Play on a massive map with all vicious AI and pirates enabled. you wont have extra cash.

Also, try playing as the other factions.

nzmx I find you to be very boring indeed-so if normal difficulty is too easy for you then what do you think you should do you ignorant *** ** ** *****?

Beating the normal ai and saying the game is too easy is evidence you were dropped when you were a baby...

edit:

as for everyone else--make it a habbit as joke to your self to set the difficulty to the hardest level and see how long you survive--its hilarious how you die the first couple of times--from there lower it-then again--and ofcourse try learn everything you can.

I set vicious ai after my first week and laughed my head off at the fleet that came for me--im a wanted fugitive but i didn't deserve that kind of punishment

Edit:

And don't forget to choose aggressor ai! Thats the best part--oh this ai spanks noobs--i love it-my cousin got a spanking for 3 months on hard-i did absolutely nothing to help him because i simply said you must learn to stand up for yourself you ignorant  *etc*

Wtf is wrong with you riddle king?

RiddleKing - noun: 1) a troll on the SoaSE forums that is not to be taken seriously under any circumstances  2) a source of entertainment that is to be enjoyed, not trifled with

for offline play...

Choose the map "Areolian Sector"

make it a 4 vs 4 game

Difficulty Hard or Unfair

Now start the game and within an hour u will experience the most monstrous fights with mind numbing fleet sizes.....Thats the most challenging aspect of the game.......and even online play cant beat such difficult settings

Play as Vasari Rebels, build only 15 Antoraks and a Colony frigate, and conquer the galaxy. There's a challenge right there.

Seriously though, try online. It's a lot more fun!