Its true Eden, stands little chance in most rushes. Not only does the player have to know what he/she is doing, but also has all that much further to go to make anything seriously useful for eden vecs.
However... as always there is a but, its been my experiance that Eden in the hands of a well rounded player (and by this I do not means super uber player, or the best of the best, greatest of the greats, just one who knows his way around the game well enough to be called average.) can easily be a deciding victor for his/her team. Think on it this way, at the time when Eden start rolling out Tiger thors, Ply is rolling out RPG and ESG tigers. An RPG can destroy buildings, but realistically it can only destroy one tank at a time. ESGs can destroy/attack several tanks at a time, but not buildings.
Edens Thor has the best of both worlds per say. It can kill several tanks at a time, as its weapons system hits not only the target but all targets immeadiatly next to the target. IE in front, left, right and behind, plus the diaganols. Not to mention 1 thor tiger can take down a building with ease max 6 shots maybe 8 if its initial aim was way off.
Now I know someone mentioned those nifty EMP missles Ply has, but well Eden can work around those, and compairativly it costs them nothing to defend against those missles. Alittle tubing, 2 observatories, 3 maybe 4 meteor defense systems and those EMP missles now mean exactly squat. Build all you like, toss of 30 or 40 of them at the exact same target, hell toss 20 at one target and 20 at another and the missles will get knocked down every time. Each observatory can track 1 target, each defense system can fire once per second. You can only fire so many missles so fast, and as soon as the 1st missle is destroyed the 1st observatory is already locked on the next missle.
Results Eden spent, 10,000 common ore, 5k rare ore maybe, plus built one extra tokamak to provide power. Ply spent more ore then was prudent, sent off a bunch of missles that did nothing and whalaa, thier still gonna attack, or worse they realize they failed thier missle attack and wait for death. No spare ore, and eden now has lots of spare ore. Say bye bye ply.