Right, so I just finished a ridiculously huge AR game against unfair AI. Here are my new impressions for the AR in single player...

So I rushed the Reanimation techs first (Which, for in case you missed the memo, have been moved to Tier 2+Tier3).  This move really made a difference, as well as fixing the techs.  These two (+ 2 upgrades = 4) techs are probably the weakest of the Free Ships techs (PM, RA...).  However, the fact that you can get them so early I think changed the overall utility for them.  I didn't feel as if they made a really big difference for my starting game, but I definitely got quite a few free ships over the course of the game.  For those of you who don't know yet, the enemy ships resurrected by Reanimation (which is only for a little while) have a chance to be resurrected by Return of the Fallen (at your home base)  In fact, I would say 70% of any ships I got back at my homeworld were enemy/pirate ships.  This could be due to the fact that my fleet were quite strong near the end, and I honestly didn't lose many units.  I was also constantly harassed by pirates... so probability wise it could be more probable that the 10*10 % probability of resurrecting reanimated units when you take into account the much higher ratio of enemy destroyed ships/friendly destroyed ships.

Overall, I like the techs.  I like the fact that they come early, and are not overly game changing.

Secondly, the shield regen buff at Tier 2 (I think) is absolutely awesome.  I started out with Discord just because I like it so much... but being a squishy cap ship I had to retreat it a lot.  However, usually it was back to full shields again by the time it took to cross a gravity well, which is awesome.  I also got the Progen early, and coupled with guardians I really felt as if my fleet were invinceble.  In fact, I had a Lvl6 ART vs lvl 6 TRT battle, which I won gloriously... even though I think we had the relative same fleet size (he was fighting with a starbase, but I had a better support fleet + in culture)

Thirdly, I only started building culture centres (beyond one or two in my home systems for allegiance) when I got the Culture Cost decrease... Again, I felt like a god as I threw down 5-6 culture centres on each new world.  

When I hit tier 8 my general strat was as follow:  After conquering a world, buff up culture centres and pop infra, + starbase with Auxillary Government (Advent equivalent) and some more culture/defenses... Then after some time (during which I would take my fleet to another less defended frontier) I would Wail of the Sacrifice and storm in with the fleet.  The starbase prevents the Wail from destroying the planet + its upgrades, and the damage itself (unless it was an asteroid) is enough to destroy constructor frigates and damage all orbital structures + defense fleet that my bombers honestly jumped from target to target after 1-2 bombing runs.  It was really ridiculous.

Lastly, the antimatter renewal structure with its shield upgrade honestly worked wonders... I sometimes stretched my fleet thin when I tried to take a world, and would probably have been crushed if it wasn't for the wonders of that llittle structure.  It also eventually provide antimatter for the starbase, so Meteor control ftw... 

In conclusion, I am not in the mood to do number crunching.  It might've been a fluke, but in the previous build I had my ass handed to me whilst playing AR against the same odds... This time I owned.  It should be noted that I had a really ridiculously slow beginning game, and struggled quite a bit to get my research up, but really made up for it in the end game despite a sub-sub-par economy...