Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

If I understand the rulebook correctly :), it's not quite as you say.

I have a starting dom level of 5, and a God with blood #6. It is true that that would give me 6 lots of 50% chance. But where you say " chance of raising dominion, no matter what dominion the province has", not as I read it. What I get is 6 lots of a 50% chance of a temple check succeeding. But that is not the same as a dom increase. As per top of page 94, the temple check success in the province which has level #9 enemy dom is 50% + (5 * 5%) - (9 * 5%) == 30%. So on average I will get 3 chances of a 30% increase overall. Which is a long way from your 6 chances of a 50% increase!

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Hum, true, missed a chapter. Sorry !

Still, with a jade knife on 4 different priests, how many sacrifice can you make ? 12 ? I don't know if the jade knife offsets the maximum number of sacrifices. It should be enough. So, I was wrong on some part, but it still multiplies the number of possible checks by "a lot" compared to standard preaching.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Absolutely. No need to apologise, I'm just learning (or waiting for someone to jump in and correct me) like you.

Thanks for the "jade knife". I had not looked up what that did/cost, for some reason I had associated it with assassination. I've ordered one now, though I have no Nature (or Astral) income!

I think it just reduced from -9# dom to -8# dom, way hay!

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Hang on! That doesn't work? You can only have one blood sacrifice in a province per turn, so I can only make one jade knife for my best sacrificer? According to me....

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Just a note, Blood Sacrifice ability is based on H not B, your god is not a good choice to blood sacrifice.

And Blood Sacrifice with a jade knife equipped H3+ priest is about as good as it gets.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

uh only priests can sacrifice. not gods...

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

didn't blood sac give 2 temple checks for each slave?

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Manual states 1 per 1.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

I believe it's 1 temple check per slave sacrificed, but a given priest sacrifices a number of slaves equal to his holy level (+2 if he's wielding a jade knife). If you don't give the priest the number of slaves he wants (at a minimum, he's cool with holding on to extras), he will refuse to sacrifice any slaves (I don't think an H3 priest will sacrifice only 1 slave - it must be beneath him).

So an H3 with no knife sacrifices 3 blood slaves causing 3 temple checks in the province he's in, and the same H3 priest with a jade knife sacrifices 5 slaves causing 5 checks. Priests can only sacrifice in a temple, and only a single priest can sacrifice in a given temple, so if you go nuts with sacrificing you max out at an H3 priest with jade knife sacrificing in each province costing you 5 slaves * # of provinces in your empire per turn (for a 20 province empire that would be 100 slaves sacrificed a turn - you better be doing some major bloodhunting!).

All those added temples also increase your effective dominion from whatever the base dominion level was that you designed for your pretender. So in the example with 20 provinces, if you had a base dominion of 6 you now have an effective dominion (20 temples/5 = +4 to base dominion) of 10. Which makes those temple checks 100% likely (effective dom * 10% = chance of candle produced?) of producing +1 candle each not counting resistance from any dominion on your borders. Use an H3 w/ a jade knife to sacrifice from every province you own and your dominion will spread rapidly. Unless you just don't own enough territory; resolve that with military might or fail in your bid to rule the world.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

I would suggest you need your prophet involved in the preaching. Hopefully, you made a holy unit the prophet, so now you have higher holy skills than normal. This helps a lot in this sort of situation and also gives access to higher level spells in combat. Some people like to make an expensive unit the prophet to cut down on maintenance costs, but I prefer having that extra holy power.

The other advantage to having the prophet there is the free temple check they provide. I understand your reasons for keeping the pretender unit away from such horrible domininon, but a the cost of losing a prophet is usually quite a bit less.

The other, longer term, solution is temple spam. Build temples in your back provinces, so you get some extra push outwards. By the look of it, your enemy is pretty strong in this area, so you are going to have this problem for a while. Long term planning may help. That plan way well include how you are going to invade them without using your pretender. Very long term, I usually find that defeating someone with better dominion is usually done by taking all of his provinces. It is hard to turn around a dominion advantage, much harder than other areas. You may just have to live with it and hope he doesn't case Dark Skies.