The AI in this game might be so challenging that we might not go online as we fear we'll be wasting time with noobs like 1 year after release. Some sort of head to head campaign and a co-op campaign (maybe even 2v2) would be excellent as that would add a spice but a feature like quick battles where there are no consequences to winning or losing might be redundant in my opinion. If you want to practice just do it with the AI with less lag, less time to wait and more flexibility.
However, I don't believe this game will feature multiplayer because that side of things is far too costly and so they'd probably have to wait and include it in the sequel. Ultimate generals selling point seems to be the challenging AI and considering we know who Darth is, we can say for sure that this isn't a marketing tactic or hype that we may or may not see unlike other games.
Let's just appreciate the single player experience first before venturing into multiplayer suggestions.