Just to provide a little bit more info on how it works. The AI in the game will ask you to do missions for it such as "Kill 4 of Faction X's trade ships" and reward you with positive standing with them and negative standing if you ignore them. These missions are timed and can have other rewards such as credits, crystal or metal.

Once you build up enough favor with the AI, you can select a planet or ships I think and then when those enemy planets are selected you have the option to request your ally to attack it. If you have high favor with them they will try to assist you. It is actually pretty nice because if you work with them you can get them to work for you to accomplish your goals.

The AI will ask you to attack your other allies though, but Blair (one of the devs) said this is not because they are being silly, it is because your alliances are secret, just like you don't know who they might be allied with trying to back stab you. They just see it as "I'm friends with you, take care of party C they are annoying me" even if you are friends with Party C.

It is not super detailed I guess, but has a lot more depth then what was there in beta for sure You can play really really long games in this if you want. I've done ones that take over 15 hours for one game on a 3 star galaxy with 30+ planets. You definitely can turtle and take your time, focus on economic and culture expansion instead of straight up military, especially if you put the AI players on a different strategy such as "AI Researcher" or "AI Economist" that way they aren't nearly as aggressive militarily toward you.