I was simply addressing the question of how many Rogue Hideouts you need if you have a Traz already... so you would still only need 1 Rogue Hideout
This is also not always true. It has a lot to do with the ratio of regular barracks (of varying unit types) a player maintains in his city compared to the number of Rogue Hideouts. Assuming a player is going to participate in both GE and GvG on a frequent basis, they are going to require a minimum of three Rogue Hideouts to go along with an average of 1 barracks each for about three different regular units types (assuming in any period that 3 units are good or great and the other 2 units are less effective or garbage). This reason for the extra Hideouts is to ensure that Traz will produce a good population of Rogues compared to the other unit types. With only a single Rogue Hideout and 3 to 5 regular barracks, Traz is not going to produce enough unattached Rogues to satisfy a GvG fighter. Myself, I prefer 4 Rogue Hideouts to 5 regular barracks/Champions' Retreats. However, some other players in my guild actually prefer 6 Hideouts. Keep in mind that these preferences are with an Alactraz that is level 10 or below, not up in the Stratosphere already (well above level 10 and thus producing many more units per day).
However, everyone knows that you never want to use more than 1 Rogue (if even that) in a GvG defense army (or any defense army, for that matter)
This is not as true in the lower ages (Ind on down) like it is in the later eras (PE and up), because the movement scale of the lower age battle maps are much different and Rogues move just as fast, and just as far per turn, as light units from those periods. So a Rogue in any period named "an age" is going to be in your face much quicker than what happens in any period named "an era". In fact, during a several-months-long GvG war, when I was still in HMA, I was able to frustrate the hell out of our enemies with different variations for the following siege and defensive army composition.
- 2-3 Rogues + 2-3 HMA Heavy Infantry + 2-3 HMA Knights
In the numbers above, 2-3 means switch up which of each unit type in the 8-unit Army Compositions have 2 copies and which have 3 copies. While each possible composition might appear close to the same, by switching around the 2s and 3s to different units, combined with the RNG transformation of the Rogues, it can actually create a wide array of different 8-unit compositions after all the Rogues have transformed. The composition above, and all of its variants, can vary enough to make it such that an attacking fighter cannot just field the same army composition over-and-over, and click "Auto" on each battle, without chewing up a number of his units where many of them are at least going to sustain damage. It is especially important to damage as many of his unattached Rogues as we can, maybe even kill 1 or 2 of them per battle. After all, warfare is the ultimate supply-chain management problem and it is an attrition problem. That comp proved to be one of the best unit-chewing comps we defended with in HMA. Now this being said, no way I would try the same comp in PE or later; I agree Rogues on defense just doesn't work in the later eras. Industrial Age is even borderline as far as Rogues go, because most Ind units have ranged attacks.
However, Rogues did get nerfed a bit a few updates back, where they now always move last. So this might affect the math now of how many Rogues to use on defense. To be honest I haven't fought lower ages GvG since that change was added. But back when Rogues moved when light units moved, the comp variations discussed above worked quite well for defense.
after a couple of weeks, you could delete your regular military buildings, because you'd have plenty of unattached troops for GvG purposes.
You have obviously never been in a GvG war to the same scale that I have. At one point in a CA GvG war, I had numerous barracks, 4 Rogue Hideouts, and an Alcatraz, and I was always running out of units. GE didn't exist during this time frame, but even if it did, that would not have been enough units. It's not just about having the attached units to place for siege and defense armies. It is also about having enough units at 100% health to continue fighting with, at all hours of the day, which requires a much larger unit population (attached or unattached). I have burned through as many as 300 Rogues in single evening of GvG, meaning that 300 Rogues that I fielded were either wounded or killed and in either case were unable to fight my next GvG battle, due to the long training/healing time. If there is ever a lull in the fighting and a player gets time to build up unattached units, then yes selling a few barracks makes sense.
The number of troops needed for a particular age of GvG is limited
In a GvG+GE guild the number of troops needed for a particular age of GvG is
limitless, not limited. That is, if both our own guild and our enemy's guild are hell bent on taking the other one off that particular GvG map; in that case, 1000s of units are going to die a glorious death and 1000s of goods are going to evaporate into thin air. Like I said above, it doesn't sound like you've participated in a GvG war to the same scale my guild has.
It makes no sense to devote much of your city to that purpose, when it clearly will take space away that you could use for more production buildings.
In general I'm all for limiting other buildings to put in more supply production buildings. However, 3 Rogue Hideouts actually fit quite nicely in most HQS city plans for either HMA or CA, because we always need some buildings that are N x 3 wide in each horizontal neighborhood; in fact, there is no way around this due to how 4x4 land expansions work with supply buildings that are 2 tiles wide. There will always 1 tile of land, running vertically throughout the city, that is simply road, which means we are always going to need some N x 3 buildings anyway.
All of this being said, I never force anyone to use all 5 regular unit types. Every player prefers to use different units. So when I help plan cities generically, I try to plan for 4 or 5 different types of regular units. But of course, if a player has 100+ unattached of one unit type, then yeah it doesn't make sense to keep carrying any more of those barracks for awhile. But a player without an Alcatraz, and without a substantial combat bonus, isn't going to have this until they negotiate GE for several weeks.
You have to remember, I'm trying to generalize advice to a mass of players, who are certainly going to have variables I cannot always account for (how they expanded their city before they read my guide or which GBs they rushed to construct are two notable examples that throw the largest monkey wrench into things). So in the sample city plans I provide, I try to strike a balance of how to cram a lot in, while working as many quests as we can. Man, if I could have worked HQS in a GE-only guild, then my GBs would all be level 20+ now, without exaggeration. At one point of our HMA GvG war, I had as many as 15 rax in my city.
But I need to out think some players who might be read this guide. Some day, some player is going to want to work HQS in a really GvG-heavy guild. And he's going to point his guild leaders at this guide and say: "I'm working that strategy to build up my city, but here is how I can help our guild while I do it." And the HQS strategy actually came from this very process. You cannot imagine the debates that used to have with some guild founders, leaders, and even my peers, in my own guild when I was first bungling my own way through this Strategy. (check any of my posted city plans throughout the topic, they have many mistakes). Most of my guild mates just didn't get, much less agree to it. I know a few players who think all a city needs is Alcatraz + SoZ + CoA + CdM, and umpteeny and umpteen barracks. And I'm not joking when I say this.
But after I first started started figuring this stuff out (at one point I had to only CF in my entire guild which was 80 members at the time) not only did my city start to expand quicker, we took in two noobs who were late EMA or early HMA, both with 0 GBs. And I took these players aside and coached them how to catch up to everyone who was higher age. Then, 9-10 months later both of them complete bypassed me and ended up in the Future Era before me, by following a revised HQS strategy that I had adapted from all of my earlier mistakes. They ended up being two of our best GvG fighters. They also passed up some of the players who used to argue with me. After this happened, no one in our guild questioned HQS any more. And what's even more important is that by fostering a guild environment that allowed players to build up their cities quickly, I could turn new recruits into very loyal guild members who enjoyed being in our guild.
The point to that guild digression is to explain that HQS was actually refined into a strategy inside of a heavy-GvG guild, where being able to contribute to GvG in some manner was a very high priority; but we tried to balance that GvG priority in ways that do not bankrupt a newer player who is still trying to expand their city and build up their GB infrastructure. Placing sieges and defensive armies is of considerable value in a GvG guild. And my guild maintains holdings in HMA and above. (We might even still have some EMA holdings but I never check that far down). We use HMA as our GvG training ground for all of our new recruits.