Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

If memory serves, these points will not help Dominion spread at all, but they will raise your maximum Dominion value by Dominion spread. So, if you picked 5 at Pretender creation, and built 25 temples, all your provinces can reach Dominion 10 automatically; only that will make it harder to push your Dominion, since +10 is harder to override than +4.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

From my memory of Illwinter's description on this forum, your nation will get a certain number of dominion-increasing "plops." A plop has a probability of increasing your dominion in a province or decreasing enemy dominion. If it does not succeed in its own dominion, it moves on to another province. Only failure in enemy dominion kills a plop. Therefore, having your own dominion 10 in provinces doesn't hurt. The plop just moves on to somewhere it has a chance of doing good.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Sometimes, I really hate English. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif When I wrote "to push your Dominion", I was speaking from the enemy's perspective, not your own perspective. I use "push" when attacking an enemy Dominion, and "spread" when putting your own Dominion somewhere, but it's not as if there was any authoritative Dominions dictionary.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Preaching the sphinx out seems like a good strategy.

If you want to fight, maybe consider fatigue inducing spells/attacks. That will help you get around the high protection, especially since the sphinx has to use fatigue to attack.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

I tried earlier to storm the Sphinx castle and "forgadabowdit". Eomer, Man and Ulm are the other powerful empires out there and are keeping my armies too occupied to bother with this "insignificant fool" (insert evil laughter).

He's bottled up in his fort. I think I will keep him there. I'm going to move my Pretender and Prophet (when I can have another since he died, lol) to the area and hope to drive down his dominion. I'd love to see him just fade away.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Alneyan, my point is still different from what you are saying, I think. If a plop is in friendly dominion +4, it might settle there to increase dominion to +5, as opposed to moving on, possibly to attack enemy dominion. If a plop is in friendly dominion +10, it will definitely move on, since it can do no more good there. Thus, having high friendly dominion and attacking enemy dominion are related. When friendly dominion is maxed out, then enemy dominion is more likely to be attacked.

Then again, I could be wrong. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Having Dominion level 10 or Dominion level 5 does not really affect that, however: your core provinces will reach maximum Dominion (equal to your base Dominion + temples) without any problem, and once it is done, they will no longer be targets for Dominion spread, at least until you get 5 more temples... but getting +1 will be easy enough when left unopposed.

Dominion spread on a spiritual border will result in heavy "fight", with nobody likely to have a maxed Dominion for long here.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

Not that I have ever tried to fight a sphinx, but what about a couple of ThunderStrikes? Its not their armor piercing, but their fatigue that might be useful here...

For if I undertstand correctly, then protection is likely to be penetrated/ignored for unconscious units. Or does this only apply to protection from armor and is the sphinx's protection value a natural/basic protection value?

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Oh, and why is Shatter not a sensible thing as someone else proposed here earlier?

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

An important thing to remember about plops and max dominion is that since a plop will spread to another province only if the province its in is "full", higher dominion will actually slow the rate at which your dominion spread to other provinces.

Re: Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?
 

I think that unconsciousness would affect defense but not protection. However, even with no protection, you still need to deal out a ton of damage -- perhaps 1000 to 2000 hit points. A regular army can't do it.

However, you probably can count on the Sphinx having Astral Shield up. Maybe the double-unconscious autokill scenario could happen more than once in a blue moon.