The Void - Tick 474 Cycle 21

 A telescope array reveals new information

My attack on Kraela was unsuccessful and with Weapons 5 vs Weapons 9 I took a more unfavourable ratio than even my greater industry can account for. This led to a little bit of a back to the drawing board analysis of how to attack. My initial thought was to load up a smuggler and run down through HelloThere into TdT looking for some weak point on the border, possibly swap a star with an ally and then launch a concerted attack with heavy specialists. I might still do this.

However, I then thought whether I can use that black hole binary I have to my south to see more of TheBorg, and the more I thought about this the more appealing it was. It took me to 7 (from 13) tokens but I was rewarded with visibility on an additional 4 stars.

The first revelation is that TheBorg has been playing with me (probably) they have a Nebula just beyond where I can see and I think are drip feeding the requisite amount of ships to Kraela to hold off the defense whilst making it look like this defense is marginal. This encourages more attacks and lets them fight me at ratios which are very beneficial for the defender but enticing to me if I see each attack only narrowly be defeated. Very clever, and a technique I know is in LeDazz's playbook, but lesson learned.

Now I have the advantage though because I see one of their warp gates and I can hit it any time I want without notice and they don't know I have this option up my sleeve. The problem is, because the star is a Nebula (and an Asteroid Field) I have no idea how well defended it is (I see a General but also an Explorer that negates it but I don't know how mobile these are.) Additionally, I have a couple of interesting alternate attack vectors. Option C is really interesting to me because of TheBorgs scanning arcs. Although it's a 25 tick jump even on a coward if I timed it right he might have as little as 12 ticks warning.

A further option is launch an attack as I have been at Kraela that I know will fail, but time a smuggler attack from up north on the turn when he would empty the nebula to defend it. He would have very little time to respond to the new threat.

I am immediately moving some ships to a staging area at the binary black hole. You just never know when Borg might add a warp gate somewhere. I'll need to think about how to subtly (or just very quickly) raise up to 3 hyperspace levels.

There's other things going on but I don't have much time so a summary

• TdT and HelloThere have shifted most of their new ship production to defend against Western attacks from Beez and Corn. 
• Amogus is associated with Sea Serpent who is under attack from HRE. This is a delicate situation. Long term we want both Amogus and Sea Serpent dead, but Amogus is being useful at the moment. Can't allow HRE to get more allies down there either though and it sounds like he and Amogus are negotiating. The northern alliance could yet become a problem.