NecriaSolaris: Trani - Mar 01 09:30

Approaching the end of Cycle 10 and the galaxy looks to be a 2-way race to the top between me and Gilgamesz. Inerz and Gilgamesz are now at war.

Strategic

'The race' is in the balance. Yesterday it looked like I had the edge but Ktoc was able to slow me down by taking stars behind my front lines and it's taken a bit of time to close that net. Now that I am (close to) re-establishing clear borders I will start to slowly push him outward. Denizen is hanging in there against Anita and Gilgamesz and war between Gilgamesz and Inerz has begun.
The consequence of Inerz and Gilgamesz getting into a hot war is that Gilgamesz is going to lose a tonne of ships. However, I do expect him to beat Inerz who is significantly behind us on technology. Gilgamesz also has more specialist tokens and specialist token income. Inerz can't be allowed to collapse completely and give Gilgamesz her industry before I'm well into my attack on Darrow.
Darrow didn't attack me last night which is a major boon. I need him to give me maybe 2 more cycles of peace and then it doesn't matter what he does.

Diplomatic

I got Weapons in my Experimentation roll so my agreed trade with Inerz fell through (I didn't need the tech they had researched.) Inerz is falling increasingly far behind on all tech now so I don't expect us to be able to trade much moving forward.
One option I'm considering to prop Inerz up is trading them some tech to match Darrow's tech level. This way Gilgamesz won't believe it's coming from me and it might slow him down. I haven't made a final decision on this and I probably won't do it - is it a betrayal? I'm not sure. It's in a grey area. If I did do it I'd need to do it in such a way to prop Inerz up without risking them actually winning against Gilgamesz. This would be a delicate balance to find. All in all, I'd prefer not to go down this road and hope I don't need to but I absolutely cannot afford Inerz to just quit. Their spirits need to remain high - to that end I've offered them help once Ktoc falls.
Gilgamesz and I working well together last cycle. We've agreed to shift trading high level tech to every 2 levels. He is still pushing Experimentation and after the game I'll explain to him why that was not the best strategy to help him out for future games. I'm prioritising Terraforming at the moment but will need to raise Manufacturing 4->6 soon.

Tactical

The Extra Northern front remains quiet. Darrow didn't attack and hopefully wont.
On the Northern front I'm closing out Ktoc's attack forces. By the end of the day he won't have any ships or stars behind my lines. This will net me 2 stars.

On the Eastern front I'm faring slightly less well. I'll capture 2 stars shortly but I'll lose one of them after. Reinforcements coming in from the North will also cause issues.

Ktoc has a 368 ship force moving in. This force could deploy or split to either front. I hope it comes to the Northern Front. It will cause chaos on the Eastern front if it moves south. As a data point I now have 31 industry in Northern Command versus Ktocs 47. Since reinforcements are still flooding in every few hours from Southern Command this is fine but it'll be a good milestone when I flip this and Northern Command is capable of standing alone.