Gareth, Sula and Co are supposed to be be tactical geniuses but the main battle between his fleet and Admiral Face Decay only consist of a few ambush that aren’t setup with enough story to make them meaningful and thus only take the enemy force done by about a fifth. Then they go straight into a pitched battle outnumber 2 to 1 and yes they use cool tactics to win but they lose 75% of their number. This is significant as the enemy admiral that was being held in a standoff has 200 ships and thus when factoring the reduced human fleet plus another chunk that hasn’t shown up yet for some suspicious reason means that for the final book gareth and sula will be outnumbered against the one admiral that on the other side that will use his tactics. There was no good reason other that plot development that they had to fight the pitched battle. His reasoning is they are getting to close to their home base. Really dumb. The gorilla tactics of layer ambushes and misdirection should have been greatly expanded on to give them more impact on the battle an as a narrative element. As it was it was like ok here’s a few ambushes. Oh they didn’t kill everybody ok now let’s fight a stupid battle and get more of my people killed. A great deal more could have been done to divide up the enemy force and defeat them in detail. Like they could have disrupted another wormhole as the enemy fleet was going through. And then taken out some of each part that goes through or doesn’t. Many other things could have been done against the Uber conventional enemy admiral. The only reason the gareth lost so many ships was to further the later plot and that is not good writing. Also Lamey has no reason to existing. It is never explained why Gareth’s brother tolerates his presence or brings him along with him. His only real purpose was to drive another wedge between gareth and sula right at the end. Ultimately it had potential just really wasted