[Mzyxptlk]

Alliances can disguise their hostility to one another by somewhat preferring to gal raid galaxies with certain alliances in them. This can be useful, as it effectively doubles the efficiency of your attacks: if you roid a random newbie and gain 100 roids, while your opponent does nothing, you've gained 100 roids on them; but if you your opponent and gain 100 roids, you've gained 200 roids on them: they've gone down 100, and you've gone up 100. If that's a prelude (of say, a couple of days) to hot war, then you give yourself a better starting position.

This is much harder with forts, because you can't "slightly" hit a fort. With fence galaxies, you can pick and choose galaxies to hit any number of planets in your opponent's alliance in them. But if your opponent forts, you either hit 8 planets or none. This takes away a lot of military wiggle room. I can hit 5 CT planets in 2 galaxies on day 1, 2 in 1 galaxy on day 2, and 8 in 3 galaxies on day 3, and then start the real war. But against Apprime, if I hit a fort with 8 planets in it on day 1, they'll immediately be on high alert.

Simultaneously, it's counter-productive to be too sensitive to incs. If every time you get half an inc, you retaliate with weapons of mass destruction (ie, alliance p-targeting), very soon you'll have no friends left. And in a game of politics like PA, you need friends to be able to roid your opponents and to reduce the number of incs you'll get yourself.