Re: I am hijacking this thread!
 

Yeah, any commanders patrolling in a castle province will fight (with their army) alongside the PD.

Also, I never knew there was a "Move & Patrol" command in D2 and I didn't discover it in D3 until about two weeks ago! And that was by accident.

Anyway, "Move & Patrol" works like this. Say you are in one of your provinces next to another of your provinces with a castle. On the other side of your castle province is a large enemy force about to move into the province with your castle. If you just "Move" into your castle province, you'll actually move your forces into the castle and the enemy will attack only your PD next turn. So if you want to defend with your army alongside the PD, give orders to "Move" into the province with the castle, then reselect your commander. Now he'll have the "Move & Patrol" command available. Select that and he'll move with his army into the castle province in a patrolling mode and when the enemy attacks they'll be facing both your commander, his army, and the PD.

By the way, "Move & Patrol" only works when moving a force into one of your castle provinces. Unfortunately you can't use it to move into one of your provinces with no castle and try and catch an enemy scout before they evac.

Re: I am hijacking this thread!
 

It is if you are doing something special with your dominion. Like if you have Gift of Health, which boost all your units health proportional to the amount of your dominion in that province. Or if you are trying to Dominion-kill someone. Or trying to spread your negative dominion into an enemies lands to weaken him w/o explicitly going to war.

Re: I am hijacking this thread!
 

A temple does raise dominion better than a couple of level 2 priests. Among other things the max dominion by preaching is 2X priest level. Temples do spread to other provences before they max the one they are in. The closer they get to max dominion level, the more likely the temple check is to travel.

On the other hand, building a temple without a castle in MP is pretty much a waste of cash unless you are at peace. It *will* be burned unless it is in a protected spot.

Re: I am hijacking this thread!
 

What annoys me is that the 'research hub' is better off in the plains instead of in a castle. Since zero of your researchers can fight with your pd, ever, unless you know an attack is coming the very turn it comes.

For that reason it's good to have a lab in a province that isn't a castle and have high pd and all your mages there researching....

Re: I am hijacking this thread!
 

Just be carefull against humans. 2-3 mages flying in with boots of flying on a suicide mission to cast earthquake x2, will kill a lot of unprotected human mages.

Re: Building temples (noob question)
 

Every 5 temples also raise max dom strength. I think it's usually best to have both temples and priests.

Re: I am hijacking this thread!
 

thanks everyone, I'm glad to see that this wasn't just a random handicap and that castles can be used for defense, rather than being obstacles to defense.

Re: I am hijacking this thread!
 

Oh - given that usually most of your researchers are fairly useless in combat ( almost any mage with no more than 1 level of magic ) you don't _want_ them getting into it. On the other paw, if you're getting indie mages with 2 or more in a path (main one I can think of in Dom3 being crystral mages and a fire mage school) you might want them out in the open doing double duty as research/defense.

But generally? Use a fort to keep them mages alive. Not many players take the time to script _every_ researching mages for combat - but when someone attacks your fort, you dang sure do. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: Building temples (noob question)
 

Yep, getting your dominion any higher than two is going to need temples. Also, temples do a check every turn, while those traveling priests don’t on the turns they move. It adds up over time, especially if you end up pulling the priests into fighting somewhere. Now, the priest is obviously more helpful and flexible in that regard, but they are not a pure dominion item. Also, if you went for scales in your pretender design, you will be wanting to take advantage of them and dominion helps. Finally, those priests are not going to push your dominion into enemy territory, so you won’t get the advantage of fighting in your own dominion except on defense. The temples will push into the neighbor’s backyard and that +1 to morale is very nice in a close fight.

In short, the traveling priest team is a good idea (I plan to steal it) but you need temples as well.

Re: Building temples (noob question)
 

Also, it appears that the mechanics of dominion spread as described in the manual are wrong - there was some rather intensive testing done some weeks ago, and reported here.

While the manual says that the "strength" of temple checks (the probability that they actually produce a dominion change) scales with the maximum dominion (ie, it's supposed to be 10% per [starting dominion] + [1 per five temples]), it doesn't seem to increase with additional temples (ie, it's only 10% per starting dominion).

So, it seems that starting with a high dominion is actually more important than it seems if you want to push your dominion ahead of you.