My pretender died for no reason!
 

That. I was playing Man in a large random map with three other factions. I had formed a nice little kingdom and then, all of a sudden, when I begin a new turn, I get a message that my Pretender had been vanquished. He had like 50 longbowmen and 20 or so knights in his army, plus 5 wardens guarding him. I didn't get any assassination warnings, so that can't be the reason.

The only thing I can think of right now is a big bunch of items (about 6 or so) he gained after beating a couple of neutral heroes that were defending an independent province. Two of them, a helm and a piece of armour, granted negative (-3 and -1, respectively) Defense to him, for some reason.

I didn't threw those away, so they *might* have killed him if his own Defense attribute went negative when I ended of the turn. I wouldn't know, since I only got the game yesterday, so any ideas will be appreciated.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Had you a weak dominion ? You may lose the game if you have no dominion. You may also lose if an ennemy fulfill victory conditions (if you played with victory points or research as victory condition ie), but normally your pretender stats or items he may carry have not such effect (or it's a bug).

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

No, I had like 10 provinces or so. Victory conditions were standard, so I assume I had to wipe everyone out to win. It seems to be a bug, and I hope it doesn't happen to me again.

It's truly a game breaker, especially due to Dominions 3's saving 'policy' (the game is always saved at the start of every turn, and you can't reload previous savefiles...).

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Did you lose the game and receive a message about how you were wiped out, or did your pretender just die in a battle? If you lost the game while still controlling 10 provinces then you probably were dominion killed. If you don't have any provinces with your dominion (White candles) then nobody believes in you and you lose automatically. Not a bug, but just something to watch out for.

If your pretender died during the battle, then there are a half dozen spells that could have killed him without you noticing it right away. You can always call him back with priests if that's what happened.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

The number of provinces you have is different than how strong your dominion is. The "vanquished" message indicates that your dominion has faltered, which is an instant game-over.

Keep an eye on those candles. They measure how fervently you are worshipped by the people within the individual provinces. If there isn't a single white candle left burning, you'll lose the game, as there is nobody left who really believes in your pretender's divine nature.

Be sure to design pretenders with a fair amount of dominion strength (5-6 is good for starters). That'll affect how fast you spread your faith and make it easier to avoid such a fate.

Even more importantly, be sure to appoint a prophet. (Select a commander and choose the appropriate command from his/her/it's menu.) The prophet, much like the pretender him/her/itself, spreads dominion automatically. That can be a vital early boost, plus the prophet also gains some nice clerical powers. In Dominions, that means some nice spells for the battlefield. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

You can also build priests and set them to spread dominion. Having them build temples is also important, albeit costly.

Last word: if it seems unfair to have to juggle this aspect of things, remember that your enemies have exactly the same issue to deal with. Often, you can avoid costly battles in an enemy's home province by simply preaching their dominion down to zero and vanquishing them that way.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

It would help to know exactly what the message said, but it does sound to me like a dominion death. The number of provinces you own has little to do with your dominion strength in those provinces. Dominion is represented in the game by white candles, and you can think of your dominion as your people's belief in your pretender. If no one believes in him, he dies. Dominion strength is one of the things you choose when creating a new pretender, and I recommend taking a strength of 6 or so, until you know the game better, and under what circumstances you might want to deviate from that.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

This could also be the dominion explosion bug mentioned before. I do know there is some weird issues with dominion suddenly getting vanished out of the blue but I forget what're the specifics.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I had this happen to me twice, the first time I was just starting, maybe had 5-6 provinces, and poof, all gone. The second time I had an enormous empire, probably 30+ provinces, and my whole empire disappeared out from under me. Both times it was because of low domain. Suddenly, I took a much greater interest in all those cheapo priests with 1 level of holiness you can recruit all over the place.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I haven't had any game end on me yet with my dominion suddenly disappearing. That's not to say such a bug doesn't exist, but with a new player, I would suspect this was simply a dominion loss. Shadowblade, take a quick look at the bullet points in the manual on p. 92. As Honey Badger said, dominion is something new players often overlook, until they feel its ill effects.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Perhaps that's the case: everything just disappeared, he didn't die in battle (there was only one message besides the vanquished one, and it was just a random event that increased defense by 10 in some province; irrelevant).

Unfortunately, I don't have the last savegame (overwrote it when I started a new one), so I can't recall the exact last message I got, though it did mention something about his lifeforce and *maybe* that he didn't touch anyone, so it's another argument in support of the dominion death hypothesis.

I remember there were a nasty lot of black candles to the north of my realm, where I was fighting the Abysians (or something like that) near their capital. However, I think the southern provinces were under my dominion. Hard to believe I didn't have a single white candle...

Anyway, I'll keep that in mind. Now, what are the best tactics for increasing my dominion? I assume using priests and have them "Preach the word of God" in provinces, but do they affect neighbouring territories as well? If that's the case, it'd be wise to strategically place them in the same way I place forts. That is, creating a network where each fort affects its own province and neighbours but without interfering with the next fort's area of effect.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Place alot of temples, sure they cost 400 gold and are easily destroyed but they give a great boost (and every 5 increases your max dominion by 1). As for preaching, i put the majority of my priests on my borders to hold enemy dominion at bay but i still spread some around my empire so dominion dosnt go down there either.

And yes, priests can affect neighbouring provinces (or else only stealth priests could remove enemy dominion)

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Actually, they do not. Priest preaching only affects the province that they are in.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Also, make sure you don't take too low a starting dominion on your pretender. Until you have enough experience to consider subtleties like horrible scales and stealth dominion, you really shouldn't go any lower than 4 for starting dominion, and 5 or 6 is really a much better minimum. This is because higher dominion is harder to push out, and also because of the way temple checks work : with a starting dominion of 2, your temples will _never_ have more than a 20% chance of increasing/spreading dominion, regardless of your maximum dominion from building temples. With starting dominion 6, each has a 60% chance.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

That actually isn't quite how it works: temple checks are based on maximum dominion, so building additional temples will increase your dominion spread chance.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Which IIRC is unlike dom2, which is probably why Cainehill got confused

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I believe it was the same in Dom2 - when I wrote this part of the manual, I used the old Dom2 dominion .pdf I wrote as a model, and this part was unchanged. In any case, I am just correcting a point of confusion with the rules - I am not criticizing. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/happy.gif

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

You should ask Illwinter if they changed it then, since they made a post at one point in the Dom2 forum that your chance of a successful temple check did not depend on your current maximum dominion, but instead on the maximum dominion at pretender creation.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

That's interesting. In the dominion chapter I wrote for Dom2, the chance of temple check being successful was based on maximum dominion, and that was directly from Illwinter. So perhaps it was changed later.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

And either way, if you take a starting dominion of 2 or 3, each temple check has only a 20/30 percent chance until you build five temples, at which point you _still_ have either a slightly improved low chance of success, or the same dismal chance of success. http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/images/smilies/wink.gif

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I play alot of games with dominion 9 or 10 and my dominion spreads like wildfire, so I would say every temple check I have is at 90% with 9 or 100% with 10. It overpowers indies with ease, slows down of course when it hits another players dominion (because u then have a largely invisible to most players dominion battle going on), enemy dominion vs yr dominion then uses a different formula to work out.

I believe the dom3 manual to be spot on in exactly how dominion works/spreads.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

The manual is definitely right for Dom3. When I referred to "being changed later" I was only talking about Dom2, and then only for part of Dom2, since at one point the mechanics were the same as Dom3. I never recall dominion working differently in either game, so I'm just taking Graeme's word for it that IW posted differently at one point for Dom2.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

That's not what the question is about. The question is about the behaviour of temples compared to the starting dominion strength. In dominions II, if you took a starting dominion strength of 1, then your temples never had more than a 10% chance to spread dominion, regardless of how many temples you had built. My question was whether the devs changed this for Dom3, or if they left it the same as in Dom2.

I found the thread where they mentioned this. It's at
Dominion Spreading Effects

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

.. and it's the same way in Dom3:

Initial dominion strength govern how easy your dominion spreads: how often you get successfull "temple checks" which results in "dominion plopps" which travel around to settle down in some province which has less then max dominion.
Thats what you pay design points for!

Number of temples only governs the max number sacreds you can recruit, and up to which strength you can boost your local dom strength by preaching (which only raises it in the prov. the priest is in).

I have seen dom strength go higher then the "rated" strength from starting dom and temple numbers, therefore the max strength seems not to be capped directly any more.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

This is not how Bruce understood it when he wrote the manual; his understanding (and mine, but then, my sources are what he wrote) is that building temples increases the chances of temple checks being successful.


Here, at least, the part about how high preaching can take dominion is wrong. Number of temples (and starting dom) governs how high your dominion can go in any province,
no matter how. The limit for preaching is twice the preacher's Holy level (+1 if there is a local temple).

This is not what the discussion is about; the question is whether the chance of each "temple check" being successful only depends on starting dominion, or on starting dominion and number of temples. The manual says it's starting dom and number of temples, and the in-game info you get when clicking on a temple seems to support this.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

The in-game info in Dom2 also indicated this, which is the problem here. My issue is that Illwinter provided Bruce with the information on dominion spread for Dom2, information that they later realized was incorrect. Bruce at first indicated that he had used this information in writing the Dom3 manual, which leads to the question of whether the dominion spreading mechanism matches the manual, or matches Dom2.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Can't see why awe has been added for high starting dominions if starting dominion is still the only number used for dominion spread.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I don't think awe was the most balanced reward for a high starting dominion but in dom II, taking dominion really wasn't that rewarding.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I just ran a test and can confirm that building more temples does NOT increase the chance of a successful dominion check. I took an imprisoned Dom 1 pretender, made no prophet, and built 9 additional temples (for 10). That "should" give a 30% check chance. But in 6 turns, with 11 checks per turn (10 temples plus home province), I got 5 pops. That's 200 times more likely if additional temples do not increase the chance of each dominion check, so we can pretty much conclude that I was still getting 10% dominion checks even with 10 temples.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Yeah, I was thinking of doing something like this, but wasn't sure how to run the test. Are you sure there was no interference from opponents' dominion? (unlikely if the map was big enough)

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I took a large map and only one, easy, opponent. His dominion did reach my provinces but it didn't reach the area I had dominion in (due to my low dominion, no prophet, and no pretender, only 7 of 30 or so of my provinces had my dominion, so I had a good neutral buffer).

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Wow. This can make a HUGE difference on larger games (especially single player).

I've often gone with a Dominion of 3 or 4 with the intention that once I build 20 or more temples I will overcome that weakness. But with this you are essentially permanently *screwed* if you start off with a very low dominion.

Does the starting dominion play any role on the "success" of your dominion knocking down a rival pretenders dominion? Or is that based on your current maximum?

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

According to the developers, the dominion spread mechanism in Dom3 works as described in the manual: increasing your maximum dominion by building temples increases the chance of spread.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Awesome. Thanks for the information.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works. Can Dominion pops get lost? I just ran a more extreme test and got a somewhat different result. I took no prophet and imprisoned pretender, as before, and played fake multiplayer so I didn't have to worry about the computer (duh...) This time the other player was far enough away to have no effect. I build 15 priests and then all at once built 15 extra temples, raising my maximum dominion to 4 (I checked on the recruitment screen). Anyway, I have 16 temples + home province = 17 checks. I forwarded through 6 turns. Expectations are:

No dominion improvement: 17*6*.1 = 10.2 pops
Dominion improvement: 17*6*0.4 = 40.8 pops

I actually got 18. This is way too few for the full improvement (p<.0001 cumulative that or below) but is a bit high for no improvement (p = .01 cumulative that or above). It's certainly not working the way I understand the manual, but what exactly is going on?

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

I think the chances of a dominion increase happening are smaller the higher the current dominion is relative to the maximum. So, if some of your "pops" were spent raising dominion 3 to 4 in your inner provinces, some of them probably got lost.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

High dominion can cause checks to affect provinces other than the source, but according to the manual all the successful checks should produce a dominion increase. Dominion checks can get "lost" only if they happen in hostile dominion (absent in this test).

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

OK, I made my own little test. I started with dominion 1, imprisoned god, no prophet for the whole test.

On the turn before I built a temple, I had a total dominion of 5. On that turn, I built 19 temples, bringing my maximum dominion to 5 and my total temples to 20.

On the same turn, my total dominion jumped to 10 (+5 increase), with dom 2 in my capitol (this at least confirms that dominion spread is after temple building).

Next turn, total dom is 11 (+1), one temple was destroyed by a random event (maximum dominion down to 4)

Next turn, back to 20 temples, total dom is 16 (+5).

Next, down to 18 temples (two destroyed by events!), no increase.

On the 10th turn after I started building temples, my pretender awakened. On that turn, I had a total dom of 33, with 20 converted provinces. My capitol had 5 dom, a few others had more than 1.

At no point during the game did I see a red candle - large map, 2 players (the other was an AI; I should have done it with a second human player, so I could control the second player's dominion).

Now, if one takes into account the fact that the capitol is supposed to spread dominion like a temple, and that I had 2 turns with a maximum dom of 4 instead of 5 (plus the fact that on the last turn, my pretender gave me a guaranteed dominion spread, plus 2 temple checks), my cumulated dominion spread over these 10 turns was 996 - this, with the formula in the manual, should give an expected 99.6 dom increase, and seeing as it's supposed to be the sum of almost 100 independent Bernoulli trials, the total should be pretty close to Gaussian with a standard deviation of 5 - but I only got a total dom increase of 28, which is roughly 14 times the standard deviation below expectation. Statistically, it's a virtual impossibility. No statistician (I'm not one, though I could be described as a probabilist) would accept the hypothesis that dominion spread follows the rules as explained in the manual.

Now, another thing I noticed was that, during the whole test, my dominion was concentrated around my capitol. OK, so it had the equivalent of 2 temples, and should have spread dominion twice as fast as the other provinces, but still - during the whole run, the area covered by my dominion was connected, any provinces with higher than 1 dom were either adjacent or 2 clicks away (except maybe on the final turn), and the only provinces with temples that failed to gain at least 1 dominion were the farthest from home.

All of this supports the idea that capitol-based dom spread might follow the rules as described by the manual, but that the chances for successful temple checks from "real" temples remain based on initial dominion. With such a mechanism, 20 temples and a capitol would give me an expected dominion increase of 2.5 each turn (2 for 20 temples at 10% each, .5 for the home province), which is much, much more consistent with the observation. Or, it could remain based solely on initial dominion, even for the capitol, which would give only 2.1 per turn - in which case getting +28 over 10 turns, even with the pretender at the end, would be a bit high.

Now, I don't know if this will be considered sufficient evidence by IW, but I cannot believe that the dominion spread rules as described in the manual are what is implemented in the code.

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Time for a bug report?

Re: My pretender died for no reason!
 

Done.