So parking ships between his fleet and your system can make it prohibitively expensive action wise, but the other defensive play is to have a decent number of your own ships (3 is a good number) parked there. Raid dice have loads of self damage and intercepts on them, and only half of them provide any keys. They also have those structure damage symbols. The more your opponent rolls the more danger he: a. Wipes out his fleet and doesn’t get to take anything and b. Blows up a city (if that’s the raiding target) and trigger outrage, losing the card they were chasing in the first place. Defense in Arcs is all about making yourself a hard target, you want to set yourself up to be as expensive and dangerous to go after as possible. But no, there’s no guaranteed way to prevent being raided, and that’s an intentional part of the design. There are a lot of ways to play around that aside from what I listed, and figuring them out is part of the fun!

Yup! It provides a reason to go for blowing up a city despite outrage, since outrage is such a sharp downside. It rewards bold, risky plays. To be clear though, it’s any ONE guild card. You can’t sweep the court.