Having played online now, my suspicion has come true: Battles in EAW GC are not decided by units, but by heroes and towers.
In a regular GC scenarion you'll start with few units, buildings and money. However, immediately from the beginning you'll have all heroes.
This has the effect that all an Imperial player will have to do to win any space battle is to group Thrawn, Piett and Mohc together and attack.
On the other hand everything a reb player will have to do to take (almost) any planet is to put the Garguantan or Yoda into a raid fleet and attack.

Another issue is that towers are too good in the beginning, before artillery, AT-ATs, T4Bs or other effective anti-tower weapons come into play. Without these units it's impossible to destroy e.g. a anti-vehicle anti-infantry tower combination without taking pretty heavy losses (at least, losses greater than the 40 credits the 2 towers cost). This leads to a strategy of constant tower spam, for a tower will in almost every situation be worth its money.
And btw. pretty please with sugar on top, make AA towers unable to target ground units - it's just annoying to have an anti-infantry turret with splash damage and twice the range shooting at you.

I have only a few minutes before posting this played a GC scenario where I (Rebel) never attacked a planet differently than with a 1-hero raid and my enemy never attacked differently than grouping all his heroes together to form a pretty almighty space and land force.
Every single battle was won for the attacking side without any losses; I quit after the about seventh hero only-battle started before any of us had built more than 2 buildings on his planets (i.e. in the very beginning of the game).

Does that sound like fun to you? Perhaps this is a special case and most multiplayer GC matches are different, but I have yet to see any.
I would urgently suggest making heroes dependant on tech level, and perhaps even deactivate heros within the first 2-5 minutes of a GC match so that you have time to build up some Force to counter them.
Also, perhaps towers should be more expensive but better (similar to the ZC towers or towers in skirmish matches) so that building them is more a strategic decision than a must.

What do you think?

I have only a few minutes before posting this played a GC scenario where I (Rebel) never attacked a planet differently than with a 1-hero raid and my enemy never attacked differently than grouping all his heroes together to form a pretty almighty space and land force.
Every single battle was won for the attacking side without any losses; I quit after the about seventh hero only-battle started before any of us had built more than 2 buildings on his planets (i.e. in the very beginning of the game).


Jeez that sounds like utter s%*t. There will be things in any game people can do to win, forgetting honour and fun. I am surprised heroes arent available at different tech lvls to being with.

Yeah, however it would be better to have a fix by petro than an honour code (just a bit more reliable :D)
Another idea I had is that you get a hero only after you've built 2-3 units of that type (e.g. you get Veers after building 2 AT-ATs) - this would asssure that a hero is not completely OP, since most likely the enemy as well will have some units that are on the same level as the hero.

Having played online now, my suspicion has come true: Battles in EAW GC are not decided by units, but by heroes and towers.
In a regular GC scenarion you'll start with few units, buildings and money. However, immediately from the beginning you'll have all heroes.
This has the effect that all an Imperial player will have to do to win any space battle is to group Thrawn, Piett and Mohc together and attack.
On the other hand everything a reb player will have to do to take (almost) any planet is to put the Garguantan or Yoda into a raid fleet and attack.


The annoying thing is that the Imperial AI player tends to just this - groups together them three and adds a bucketload of ISDs into the mix. It's pretty difficult to handle that type of offense unless you happen to have a massive fleet headed up by Ackbar and including the Falcon stationed in orbit.

The part about the rebels, though - that's what the rebels have to do. What with At-Ats and Canderous tanks running around, the standard rebel units die a quick death. The rebels are supposed to rely on their heroes though.