[booji]

it seems totally silly to go on gate's criteria for deciding if you are hitting an asc fortress, if your decisions whether to attack a gal was based if you were likely to be attacked back by asc (I assume they were not) as asc would be much more likely to use its own criteria than gate's!
I dont like private wars so attacking you back something I would not ask for anyway unless you got considerably more persistent than you were, although it was annoying that you picked days where asc was under very heavy attack elsewhere thus denying us defence - I imagine this was intentional.

if asc had decided to retal all that would have mattered would be asc's perception of a fortress not yours or gate's.

Its not really a matter of 'this is a fortress' so there will be a response, it is much more about the number of members you are hitting. The idea of the gal being a fortress does not matter, its about the perception of 'your' alliance hitting alot of 'us' this does not have to be by hitting a gal with alot of 'us' it can be spread across the universe. The advantage of a galaxy that is known to have alot of ppl from one alliance in it is that it is obvious when you are attacking that you are attacking that alliance. If you were not worried about hitting a gal with 8 asc member why be worried about hitting 10 or 15 or 20... you state a random cut off point that is senseless except for trying to exclude 11 1 so that your argument stacks up when it does not.

if 'they' attacked 8 of 'us' across 8 different galaxies would they' expect a response?

as an example of differing perceptions: in round 28 TGV was attacking what we believed to be random galaxies while avoiding heavy ND gals due to nap, and gals with lots of asc members (at the time we defined that as 3) due to an avoidance agreement. This lead us to hitting quite a few vision in our random daily gal raids. We did not realise this and did not mean any hostile intent, however vision retaled us with 3 days of ptargeting because they thought we had targeted them.