Alliance are a serie of different mods. On the Star Wars GC, you can play the civil war Empire vs Rebel era + Black Sun and soon the Republic and CIS.
This is a example from what you will see in the Rebellion addon. Where you can play a GC against two factions controlled by the IA and all the 191 planets from the mod, you will see some special space maps and the game building speed has been increased to one more realistic value. There are less ground teams and they are groups of units. Many of the space units are upgrades from others and many are builded only in their origin planets. Other point is how there are more unique units.