Here are some things from my perspective, I think:
One night we had inc from 4 allies on our 3 heavy gals, with Apprime's BS fleets the last to launch on our fattest gal. We were thinking about what we could do about it when we learned CBA had organized it because apparently we had been hitting ODDR heavy gals. That was a pretty lol moment for me, and very surprising. Anyways we lost like 7% and figured that would be it, we were the top avg size iirc, but the next night we got targetted again, with app still launching last. Again thinking what to do, it was clear the specific targeting of us was orchestrated (lol) by cardi. This was quite an exciting night, as we then had something to do with our round besides gal raids and opportunistic targets. We lost 7% again I think, but then hit app with euphoria the next day, and then for maybe a week straight (or maybe one day off).
I think we first tried just raiding their gals, which worked alright except it caught them off guard a little. Another night of less successful galraids and we went to more launches, with 2/3 coordinated raids launched. This whole time, DLR at least, had been doing varying levels of launch/recall missions on app, but only managed to roid planets that weren't in stronghold gals. They also had their pillagers bulked this time around (have you wondered why their fleets are so pill heavy even now?), which are pretty awesome defships against our fi/co. The other race advantage app had over us was tycoons, and some nights they were able to offset or even gain on their roidless to us. But that's ok with us, we like annoying someone almost as much as roiding them, and attrition is a favorite of ours because we have so many north americans. I'd like to point out that their def was the most disciplined I've seen in awhile (certainly this round); not only were they efficient at covering things, but they got almost every fleet pulled the next tick (we'd be pulling ~10 seconds to tick). I think I saw maybe 2-3 burned def fleets after like a 9 hour stretch earlier on, with the vast majority getting pulled with no tick loss.
Anyways app had massive pillager fleets by this point, and we couldn't hurt them as much as we wanted to, so ND joined us, figuring the extra fleets would make for easy roids I guess. After maybe 2 nights we decided to switch to the asc fortress gals (gotta hit them early every round, and we're never early enough imo). I'm not sure at what point subh and ct joined into 'the block' (personally I have never really thought of them as anything more than frequent attack partners), but it wasn't before ND. Once we started hitting asc my Thanksgiving break was hitting stride and I was pretty inactive for a few days, and when I'm back we're hitting vision. We've shared fr/de def fleets with Euphoria since we realized we couldn't stop apps tycoons individually (getting SKed helps you realize this much faster, as does cardi running his mouth), and occasionally fi/co fleets. I'd surely consider them our allies for the round (but I don't feel part of a block, and before we started hitting app we were teaming up to hit the top gals. I wouldn't mind hitting app longer, but since we're at a point after letting up on them, I can also agree with hitting asc. Ascendancy usually leaves us alone unless they've secured the round win, in which case they'll pwn us, so we like to delay that when an opportunity presents itself; plus they are hard targets and won't get hit unless it's us. Since we started hitting asc, we've been crashing a lot (they usually seem to have this effect), with the last two days being cringe worthy. Part of me gets frustrated and wants to kick them from tag, but then I think I could ****up and crash tomorrow and it's just a game.
tl;dr: you saved yourself a few minutes
