Quick tutorial about Rogues and Alcatraz - Traz produces troops randomly from the number of barracks you have in your city! If you have 1 rogue hideout and 10 other barracks, you're going to get mostly other troops and not rogues, because your chance of a rogue will be 1 in 10. If you have 1 rogue and 1 champ barracks, you have a 50/50 chance of getting a rogue or champ when you collect from Alcatraz. That's a lot better than 1/10!

For this reason a lot of people sell off any duplicate barracks or anything that isn't special and can be rebuilt (save your champs!) in order to let their rogues multiply for a while. This is called building up your rogues, or I've also called it going on a rogue diet. You're going to need a stock of 50-100 rogues to really start to be able to rotate out the injured in a fight and be able to keep going. The more rogues the better, but 100 is a good starting goal. I sleep better if I have more than 500 rogues.

USE OF ROGUES ONCE YOU HAVE THEM: Rogues are ALWAYS useful for Expeditions, GvG, GBG, and fighting neighbors in the Hood. I usually take 1 real troop and 7 rogues to every fight, sometimes 2 troops and 6 rogues if 1 kind of troop isn't going to be good enough to kill all enemy units. Rogues are the only thing that really makes longevity and many fights possible - rogues absorb that first hit and turn into a real troop, and as long as it's not artillery or ranged unit, they also hit back after they transform. That makes all the difference in the world in any fight, any age.

HOWEVER - the fighting AI for the quest maps in the provinces (continent map) is different. It ignores rogues, making it very hard to use them successfully after Industrial Age. Rogues are useful again on the continent map in TE and FE only because of stealth technology - if you attack with a stealth unit and 7 rogues, it forces the AI to target the rogues first because it can't shoot the stealth targets at range. Otherwise, the troops on the continent map are smart enough to just kill your real troops first and leave all the rogues to die in 1 hit (with nothing to transform into, rogues simply vaporize into a puff of smoke.) Many a person first entering Progressive era, where the battlefield scale changes to 1.5, has lost all their rogues trying to use them on the continent map; it doesn't work that way after Industrial and it's really tricky using rogues on the continent map at all, because the computer ignores them and always goes for your other units first. THE PVP ARENA also ignores rogues - in the PVP Arena you need to attack with 8 real troops and no rogues, or you will very likely wipe out and lose all your troops.

BALANCE OF ROGUE HIDEOUTS TO OTHER BARRACKS: For anyone struggling to find the balance of rogue hideouts to other barracks, a good rule of thumb is between 1/3 to 1/2 of your total barracks would be rogues if you're trying to maintain a balance of troops being produced by Alcatraz. 1/3 works for me now, but I have high boost and high Alcatraz. For a long, long time I had 8 rogue hideouts to about 16 or 20 total barracks which was 50% to 40% rogues. The troops that Alcatraz produces daily is random from among the barracks in your town, but over time it does balance out to 50% if you have half rogues and half other barracks. And you don't want to be demolishing and rebuilding barracks too often as that does cost you time as well as resources. But Alcatraz does count a barracks in your town even if it is not fully built yet (found this out one day rushing to get some grenadiers, put a barrack in the mud and collected Traz, got 2 right away!)

MOBILE ONLY ROGUE BALANCE: In this case your army setup will change as your fighting focus will be GBG, GE, and PvP in the hood or arena, all of which occur only with your current era troops. In this arrangement the best option for your city is to have only a single barrack of any one troop type and a matching number of rogue hideouts to the total number of other barracks. This reduces land consumption in your city while providing a balanced rogue to other troops ratio. Many mobile players amass 500+ rogues and an equal number of other troops for quick cycling GBG battles.

The beauty of Alcatraz is the ability to have a stocks of unattached troops, in many ages, not just your current age, without having to have all of the barracks built at the same time. You can't possibly keep barracks from all ages built in your town at once (though I give it a really good try in my city!) so you need to rotate what is in your city to let Alcatraz create stocks for you. A beginning fighting stock is at least 20 fast, heavy, and artillery units in every age. If you participate in GE and do level 1-3, you win 24 unattached troops for your current age every week. I find that once I make a stock of my current age up to around 100 of the ones I use the most, I can delete current age barracks and sustain all my needs for current age on GE winnings. This frees up space to 'back build' previous ages as needed.

NEW 2023 STRATEGY: I don't keep barracks in my city any more, except for rogues. Because we have constant events which require an open space (usually at least 5x5 for me) to build X and build Y all the time, which I then immediately sell, I have also adopted that as a way to keep a stock of troops in all ages for GvG. Every day before I collect my Alcatraz, I see what troops are low, maybe Modern, PME, FE hovers, some ballista, and I pick 1 or two to build in the open space, then collect traz to get the troops restocked, and sell the barracks. This way the open space they force us to keep for event quests is also temporary barracks space for Traz collections.

If you're just getting started, heavies hold up the best so perhaps start with the heavy unit for one age you don't have and let Alcatraz make a stock of at least 20, then switch out and make artillery for that age, let Traz make a stock, switch out and make some horses for that age. Switch out and make the next age. For advanced players with high boosts, I find I can concentrate on just artillery in ages PME and below, and artillery doubles as both a good attack and a good siege army. If you only have room for one barrack in an age, build the artillery. You can do this with as little as 4x4 space in your town, or do it with more space and barracks at a time, or keep the barracks longer to get more than 20 stock, but the rotation and maintenance of stocks is the important idea. If you have an Alcatraz you should never have to say "I have no troops" for any age that you have unlocked in the game. Being able to place Defensive Armies (DA) troops or sieges in sectors is another matter, for that you want to have barracks up and use attached troops, but you should be able to fight a siege on any map with unattached troop stocks.

The key to all this is using ROGUES to fill in an attack army, and try not to lose your unattached troops when you fight. Keep your rogue hideouts producing all the time; this should always be true while you rotate stocks of other troop barracks to pair with them. We rely on Rogues to take most of the damage so that troop stocks can be maintained (if your stock in something gets too low you have to build the barracks again to make more.) An attacking army usually consists of 1 or 2 "real" troops and 6 or 7 rogues - try to take the fighting damage to your rogues and protect the real troops - you can purposefully include a rogue that is injured/missing 1 or 2 ticks of health and this will refocus the battle away from your real troops and toward the injured rogue. You can also fight manually, keeping your real troops back on the first turn or making sure they stay back - artillery and heavies don't advance much and are usually safe to "auto" battle, but fast units as well as some others need to be told to stay or moved to the safety of the upper left or bottom left corner before you can auto battle safely.

Not only will this method allow you to fight more and across more ages, and participate with the guild in GvG battles on many maps, but it also should improve your medals income and placing on PvP towers. I find that the top 2 towers get the most attention and points from any given neighborhood, so if you're in Progressive for example, probably most of the score is concentrated on the Industrial and Progressive towers. So what about all those medals available on Colonial, LMA, HMA (EMA and Iron too) towers? You can easily pick up medals on lower age towers that are ignored, sometimes with just 1 or 2 fights or by using the slackers who place 2 spears defenses in your hood to score easily on lower towers for extra medals income.