I believe it was just the starter setup, it wasn’t random. First few rounds I used our leaders to subjugate or make planets loyal and unless his plans were directly in conflict with mine I didn’t worry about it as the Imperial plans seemed pretty good at subjugating or negating rebel loyalty. I had a second death star up and running by turn 4 at the back of the board, which just happened to be right beside his base.

So I probably gained 1 or 2 loyalty a turn, a few ships a turn to enforce our planets and 2 probes. By turn 6 we each had 8 leaders to expand actions too. I really just primarily concentrated on expansion and cutting off rebels and forced a few threats on a couple turns to capture Leah so that tied up a bunch of his heroes which also limited his expansion.

Not saying either of us played brilliantly and it’s entirely possibly some rules were messed up. Just saying based on my experience the balance seemed off.