DeletedUser23444
Not everyone does this because some of us like GvG, other GB's and different buildings while we advance. This is not for everyone
Contrary to your misconception, GvG and Heavy Questing are not mutually exclusive. The heavy questers in my guild right now are all reigning terror in HMA GvG maps; just like I did back when I was in HMA. Most of these players are also the alpha predators of their neighborhood as well, plundering at-will. Having a high combat bonus actually is not as important in an age like HMA as having one will become in Colonial Age. And I coach the players in my guild to learn to fight GvG, C map, and Plunder without a combat bonus first so that they learn to make better use of micro-ing units and taking advantage of terrain bonuses. By the time we get them half-way through Colonial Age they are going to have all their combat bonus GBs constructed. And by the time they leave Colonial Age, they are going to have all three combat bonus GBs level 10. But they will also have had the experience of learning to fight GvG without a bonus. This helps them later in the game when they have to fight C map provinces with insane bonuses and two waves of units; or, they have to fight an HQ sector in GvG with fighters from an enemy guild trying to break our siege.
A lower-age player only has so many FPs to spend each day, so we prioritize GBs differently, focusing first on constructing and leveling up GBs that help a player's city expand faster. On the list of "snowball GBs", we do prioritize constructing and leveling up Castel Del Monte, but we delay construction and leveling of CoA and SoZ. Since a player cannot afford to level up all three of these combat GBs at the same time anyway, then there is no reason to consume land with all three of them early in the game when land is much more scarce. By constructing and leveling up CdM, the player increases both his combat bonus and his daily FP production — two useful benefits from the same land consumption and FP expenditure. The 24 hour coins production from CoA is a crap GB benefit that does not justify that CoA consumes 400% of the same land that SoZ consumes. Even though leveling up SoZ is the cheapest of any GB in the game, it is still a single-benefit GB that will not help a player convert the FPs swapped to it into forward game progress. Plundering a hood that is comprised of players from: Bronze Aga, Iron Age, EMA, or HMA, is not going to produce more medals than heavy questing will, nor will it help produce more FPs-per-day or more goods-per-day than leveling up the 5 GBs I recommend on the HMA and below list will. Players in lower ages do not own as many interesting buildings to plunder (Bazaars, Mad Scientist Labs, and so on) so Heavy Questing is actually a more lucrative and more reliable source of enhanced revenue than combat is.
But the fact of the matter is that all of my guild mates that I have put through heavy questing, now kick major GvG ass in middle ages and later eras. And overall they have nearly double the GB levels of other players who prioritized combat GBs first and who designed their cities full of mainly barracks and/or goods production buildings in the early game. And most of my questers complete GE level 4 each week; they fight what they can and negotiate what they cannot, because they can afford to do so. That is why we put them into this strategy; it gives them so many more resources and more forward momentum in the game. It allows a complete noob to catch up to established players at the top of our guild much quicker.