Here's a video of me winning a galactic war game on highest difficulty - without doing a single thing: I used a General Commander with basic vehicle tech, +25% econ tech, and complete orbital tech (which wasn't used). Perhaps this indicates that maximum difficulty should be a bit harder?
I haven't tried the PTE. But in current version, I feel the AI is too weak, too. The AI seldom builds the T2 unit, this makes them quite easy to defeat. The AI commander is also very easy to be killed by simple boom bot sniping.
To be fair, you seemed to have two subcommanders there, so it was kind of watching two AIs vs one AI. The enemy AI didn't even have a resource multiplier, which means that this was one of the first fights. The fights do get harder after playing a few rounds. The "General Commander" layout that comes with the two subcommanders is kind of overpowered in the beginning. Once the resource multipliers start kicking in and you get multiple enemy commanders things should get a bit harder. Though subcommanders will always be extremely helpful. It could probably be toned down a bit. I don't know what AI levels the subcommanders play at. Probably Absurd. So reducing that may help.
I haven't seen anything from Uber to indicate that this is the case. @Sorian @jables @mkrater This is absurd. You should be seeing boss levels of difficulty from relentless on your first match, and it should only get harder. Absurd should be nigh-unbeatable unless you really know what you're doing from the very first match.
almost a month ago https://forums.uberent.com/threads/is-galactic-war-supposed-to-be-this-easy.70144/ apparently they had some fixes coming, but it might still need some tuning.