As for the vs 9 AI game: Try malice and cleansing brilliance (its the colony and the fighting mothership that have these abilities). Cleansing brilliance does a ton of splash damage in the beam ray and malice spreads damage across the enemies fleet. With just those two capitals and NO support at all I quite often wiped out fleets of like 50 light frigates (in patch 1.02) within seconds. Having those two cap ships at a choke point just leveled up to 6 and you can basically hold off the AI forever.