No Hard or Expert to beat for the tutorial = no unlocking Alliance or Empire?
Alliance/empire work with me, though I had them unlocked from way back so dunno if it’s about unlocking them for the first time.
Huh, I always had them unlocked before, too. When I loaded 1.09, though, I only had Federation. Then I beat the tutorial (which is only on Normal) and unlocked Rebels again. I figure there’s an easy temporary fix but I haven’t looked into it yet. I was working on my Federation fleet anyways 
Yeah… Had the same problem in 1.08 but that was fixed in 1.09. Something gone wrong somewhere i guess. Saw some temporary fix for 1.08 somewhere else here in the forums.
Open up sc.dat in the GSB folder under My Documents/My Games.
Make a backup, then edit this section so that all beaten_ = 1.
[tutorial1]
tutorial = 0
beaten_easy = 1
beaten_medium = 1
beaten_hard = 1