Can Guardian + Suppressing Fire be made into a somewhat valid strategy?

[Ywen]

The Guardian path seems to me to have ONE big upside: having your towers increase your maximum army size. On paper, +2 military for an upgraded building that's cheap, takes NO space and that you can just repeatedly put on each tile sounds awesome: you need only few military buildings and can use the extra space for eco. It seemed to me that one of the best clans to benefit from this is the Horse (due to how fast they can mine and upgrade buildings). The problem is you need to reach 1500XP to get it, before that you are basically naked (unless you've built lots of military camps, which would then make that Guardian buff much less useful). So after trying that strategy with Horse in ranked matches online (mostly FFA) quite a few times, it never really worked. Just to be clear: I don't necessarily mean "effective" in the sense I can get an army that can do an all-out attack, rather in the sense that it can defend itself while pursuing another victory condition, or helping teammates.
Major problem is that it's very easy to get raided before reaching the required 1500XP (I never manage to get it before end of 802, even with my towers having produced XP for basically the whole game). Have other players been able to use that strategy with better success?

[Aratorin]

I'd say the major benefits are the free always replenishing Militia, and the ability to scout without have to waste villagers as Scouts. The extra military space is a late game benefit for if you need to go on the offensive.

[Ywen]

The scout capacity of the towers is rather underwhelming. It also seem a bit random (doesn't seem to work systematically?). And the militia is capped to 4, and cannot be improved with forge, so not great either...

[Aratorin]

Originally posted by Ywen:

The scout capacity of the towers is rather underwhelming. It also seem a bit random (doesn't seem to work systematically?). And the militia is capped to 4, and cannot be improved with forge, so not great either...

It's not random at all. They scout all adjacent tiles. All tiles within a distance of 2 if upgraded.

Yes the militia is capped at 4, but that's 4 army that requires 0 upkeep, and replenishes for free. They can easily hold off any early rushes, especially with the new Supply Malus weakening attackers substantially.