The red nodes are much better here. You did a great job of working the maze around them for avoidance, while providing an avenue for capturing enough that once you have to start capturing them, you don't have to worry about it.
Overall I enjoyed this quite a lot. I took a lot longer to play through this than I probably could have. I am not a speed demon on any map. I don't like the whole pause mechanic in KnuckleCracker's games, so I rarely pause when I'm playing. I find the realtime strategy method to be much more fun. Keeps me on my toes.
Spoiler
As is common with most of this series, once you reach some magnitude of AC, the maps just get steamrolled. Once I took the lower right, there was so much AC on the map that it started spilling into dead space. Literally my entire map was covered with AC when I finished. I'd challenge you to find some type of mechanic that continues the difficulty throughout the map's entire duration. That way we don't just keep reaching some tipping point at which everything becomes trivial. I also think the guppies, while useful, were overly abundant. You didn't really need 3 of them here. One would have done just fine.