It’s amazing how often people overlook what lies at the very roots of this game: dominion.
More often than not, I see players looking at it as a way to boost the number of sacreds they can recruit per turn and no more, as if no veteran player in his right mind should ever consider it as a sound strategy towards victory.

Yes, it IS possible to domkill even an aware and knowing opponent. Yes again, it is possible to leverage your dompush before the kill to gain a substantial economical & military edge, without bankrupting yourself in the process.

Pros :
- a way to win that can be faster than any other
- a way to fight a militarily superior opponent and come out the winner
- a way to fight several opponents at once
- a way to boost your economy while crippling your opponent’s

Cons :
- become Public Enemy n°1 in no time. Diplomacy is your only friend.
- cripples your blood economy, forget about those nice summons.
- Faith is fleeting. Before you reach the critical mass, nothing’s ever certain.
- You need to play a blood sacrificing nation in order to use this strat. Refer to the 5th section of this guide

1/How does it work?

Dominion war is an altogether different way to wage war on your opponents. It’s a lot akin to the modern world in that way : we have NAPs and alliances all around while the economical wars rage underneath, secret services spread our influences and battle underground while the countries are at peace and our armies stay at home.
This is the story of the Cold War, won by the USA with ideology and economy rather than guns.

To learn the basics of dominion spread, you should start by reading the manual page 92 as it explains a lot, albeit with some errors. I also highly recommend you read that thread with vfb tests on temple checks and blood sacrifice: http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=43356
The bottom line is that temple checks from temples, blood sacrifice and juggernauts are based on your starting dominion while those from your pretender and prophet are based on your current dominion. Also, your home province and each blood slave sacrificed generate two temple checks and not one as stated in the manual. A H3 priest wielding a jade knife is sacrificing 5 slaves/turn for a grand total of 10 temple checks + 1 for the temple itself!!!

So, there are 2 ways to spread your dominion, both inside and outside your territory: preaching and temple checks (mainly from temples, pretender/prophet and blood sac), the latter being by far the most reliable and powerful. As your opponent will use the same tools, it will eventually come to comparing raw dominion strength at the right place.
There’s nothing here as sophisticated as the careful scripting of dozens of mages in the right order and precise placement of units around the battlefield. No. It’s as simple as reaching a critical mass in domspread that exceeds that of your opponent in a given province.
To quote Patton: “War is simple, direct and ruthless”. Dominion war is that.
There’s a bit more of course, else everybody would use it ad nauseum, but critical mass is the way.

The manual is also wrong on something else: you don’t have to wait for a given province to be at fulldom to see your dominion spread to nearby provinces. All you need for that is a friendly dominion.
It would need some serious testing but my gut feeling is that you have about as many chances to see it trying to spread as trying to increase dominion in your province. I’ve seen countless times my dominion spread to 2 or 3 provinces away in a single turn with each province on the way remaining at 1 to 3 candles max.
Also, it’s nowhere near as difficult as the manual says p.93 to reach fulldom in a given province. It states that your chance is 30% minus (3% x friendly candles) for a temple check to make an actual increase. If it were true, you’d need an average 33 temple checks for the 10th candle in any dom9 province!?! And that’s without your enemy trying to lower it in the meantime. Not even close to reality.

But you still have a lot more chances to see it spread if your province is already at fulldom since all temple checks will then spread outward.
In fact, your dompush will really start to kick in when most of your own provinces will be at fulldom which should be one of the basements of your strategy.


Items and Rituals to help your dompush CBM 1.6:

Jade knife (N1B1 construction 4): Allows you to sacrifice 2 more slaves per temple. Absolutely necessary to reach the critical mass in close quarters.

Stone Idol (E2S2 construction 6): Equivalent to carrying a lvl3 heretic in your backpack. What’s really interesting is it’s independent from the carrier so you can have its effect on the turn you arrive in the province. Quite good on a scout, especially if flying.

The Ark (F5S5, construction 8): Turns the carrier in a kind of prophet. Don’t build it for the sole purpose of dompushing, that would be way too expensive.

Melancholia (6E, Thaumaturgy 6): Lowers the dominion and the prod scale to sloth 3 in the targeted province. Thanks to Lingchih for pointing out that this spell bypasses domes without a check. Very nice spell to spam at your opponent’s capital.

Juggernaut (15S, construction 9): Acts as a prophet and spreads your dominion, albeit based on your starting dominion. Expensive.

Baleful star, Blight, Rain of toads, Raging Hearts etc…: any ritual that raises unrest in a target province is a bless for your stealthy preachers as well as a curse for your opponent’s economy. Use them liberally on the forts where you stack your stealthy preachers.


What happens when you finally domkill your opponent?

All his provinces turn neutral at the end of the turn you domkilled him. On the turn you have the message announcing his defeat, his armies will still appear on the map but it’s an illusion, ghosts from the past turn and even a scout can take these provinces unchallenged. The forts still have to be besieged but as empty forts.
In order to claim your prize you should have readied scouts and flyers to reach all your opponent’s lands on that very turn, lest you find the others grab it before you (even then…)



2/Side effects of your dompush ::

- Your scales will be maxed in most of your provinces. It might be a good idea to take nice ones.
- Your scales will replace your opponent’s, but only their bad effects will apply. It might be a good idea to take extreme scales. Order 3 Sloth 3 Cold3 Growth 3 Misfortune 2 Magic 1 nets you a +6% gold/growth, few bad events and even 40 design points. It really is Order 0 Sloth 3 Cold 3 Growth 0 Misfortune 2 Magic 0 to your enemy. That’s a lot of bad events, low magic and -24% gold. Sounds good? It is.

*Edit* Thanks to Chrispedersen for pointing out that growth takes effect even under enemy dominion.

- You benefit from a lesser version of “Eyes of God”
- Your pretender and prophet hps go through the roof while your opponents’ plummet.
- You will love immortal raiders under friendly dominion

Globals that benefit from your dompush CBM 1.6:
Enchanted Forest (35N Conjuration 6)
Spawns vinemen in the forests under your dominion, depending on your growth scales and dominion strength. If you need some free chaff and have means to buff them, this is the way.

The Wrath of God (70S Evocation 6)
Domlvl x10% to cast a 10AN lightning bolt on each enemy inside your dominion, even underwater. Human equivalent troops? Bye. Roughly half the mages of this game? Bye bye. Very potent.

Strands of Arcane Power (40S Evocation6)
Gives the caster a chance each turn to find lvl 1-3 sites at random under your dominion. He must be able to manually search the site to have a chance to find it. It will also show at which lvl your mage searched it as per manual search. Also gives you a chance to magic duel to feeblemind any astral mage inside your dominion or mind burn other mages.
I’d love to try that with a high astral pretender with dompush, maybe F9S9 dom10 mictlan pretender? You’d need the chalice or someone to heal him if you lost your magic duel though.

Gift of Health (50N Enchantment 5)
Domlvl x10% bonus to all your units’ health and a chance to heal any affliction. It usually is used for its healing ability and as a defensive global. What about raiding deep inside your enemy’s kingdom at x2 health? :)

Gift of Nature’s Bounty (50N Enchantment 8)
Domlvl x20% income bonus to all lands under your dominion. That’s x3 to all lands income at fulldom. Beware that it also affects your opponent’s lands, though he’ll suffer from the side effects of your scales at the same time. Still very potent. Look at the graphs in the InversionsRedux MP game file attached.

Haunted Forest (60N Enchantment 9)
Life after Death for all units killed under your dominion, including your opponent’s. Great spell if you plan on having your dominion everywhere.

Dark Skies (30A Thaumaturgy 5)
Enemy units suffer from a -1 morale malus per candle, hence -11 at fulldom if you also factor -1 for hostile dominion. Nice spell against huge armies (non undead) or in combination with awe or fear.

Purgatory (40F Thaumaturgy 7)
LA Ermor’s bane. Domlvl x10% chance to cast a 18AN fire damage spell on each enemy undead inside your dominion. At fulldom, 100% chance, only thugs/SC survive. Look at the Corydalis file attached.

Lure of the deep (50W Thaumaturgy 7)
Very situational but the usual drawback is to put you at ill with everyone as long as they have a shore. Since you’re going to be at war with the rest of the world anyway, it might be interesting. Never tested it though.

The Looming Hell (60B B Blood 5)
Very disappointing even with a huge dominion. I tried it in InversionsRedux with an overwhelming dominion and meh.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

3/Strategy :

I view this dominion war as something quite manichean, what with all these black and white candles, quite the same as the old fire/water opposition. Let’s say for the sake of my explanation that you’re in the water side. Look at these black candles as if they were burning trees. This is a wildfire and as a fireman you shall do your best to extinguish it.
Now how are you going to use these tools?

- Preachers & Stealth Preachers: They’re your firemen. Used to consolidate at home or to go deep inside the fire if stealthy. They sadly are as efficient as firemen without fire hoses. They can do some nice things against a small fire (ie. low dominion, few candles) but don’t expect much of them against a raging wildfire (a province at fulldom is nearly immune to them)

- Blood sacrifice: Ah, there you’ve got fire hoses, albeit they seem to be used in a smoke cloud. It targets as precisely as a mole in the fog and you’ll often rage at the direction in which you dominion spread but no other tool yields so much results. Jade knife is a high-technology fire-fighting foam to enhance your efficiency. Mandatory.

- Flying pretender/prophet and Melancholia: Your Air Tankers snuffing candles from afar.

Again, it’s all a matter of critical mass. Ever seen the efficiency of a single fire hose against a rampaging wildfire? Moot. No, you need to drown it. Literally. Hundreds of hectolitres it is if you want to reach any result. There really is a threshold before which you rage at the poor results of this tactic and beyond which the results are shockingly good. The difference between a candle with or without a flame.
In short, be heavy-handed whenever you try to snuff those candles. And don’t worry that any leftover would be lost, it’ll just spread to nearby candles.

In my skaven guide I advised to teleport a grey seer (S3H3 stealthy preachers) wielding a jade knife behind the lines to blood sacrifice in the heart of your enemy dominion. Later, I ran across a Marverni guide from Baalz that advised to do the same with several druids teleporting with jade knives. You’d think we had the same idea? Wrong.
I was wrong and he was right. The key word here is several.
I tried my tp tactic in MP. I had a H3 preacher wielding a jade knife, sacrificing for a grand total of 11 temple checks and all I had for my pain was a fit at the results. Though my enemy barely had 4-5 temples at most in the neighbourhood. You need to reach the critical mass.
I tried it with just one more H3+JK sacrificer and all of a sudden, like a barrage giving way to a lake after a heavy rain, it suddenly spread with high velocity.

This rule applies to everything you use to dompush. Whether it is stealthy preachers or sacrificers, use them in clusters.
That’s also why blood sacrifice is so much more efficient than preaching: it’s a lot easier to get 50 temple checks spreading outward from a few provinces than to get 50 H3 stealthy preachers inside your enemy’s kingdom. Even then, I’m not sure they would be as efficient. Add to that the cost of 50 H3 preachers in comparison to 5 H3+JK sacrificers.
Sure you can target provinces with stealthy preachers but still…

Finally, I’ve noticed that all my domkilling games were shortlived ones, as everything was decided by the end of year 4. When the domwave start rolling over the landscape like a tidal wave, there are just so many nations threatened by it that the game’s soon decided between the few survivors of the Deluge. It’s a matter of you domkilling everyone before they gang and kill you…or not.


Year 1:

During the early game, don’t dream of domkilling anyone unless you start next to a low dominion with a flying dom10 pretender and/or prophet ready. Your pretender is a dompush cluster all by himself with 3 guaranteed temple checks at dom10. Only it can allow you to score a domkill before year 2, as it’s hard to blood sac and get more than a handful of stealthy preachers in year 1 (which would also be crippling to your early research). The best way to leverage its cost is to take an awake SC (awe+2) with a high base dom like a Prince of Death or a Virtue.

Catch your opponent unaware and avoid the usual strategic places like forts or chokepoints that are so obvious you risk to run in his main army. Try instead to target the dominion pockets to drown his candles, a thing your pretender is most efficient at. At this stage of the game, your opponent should only have a few candles to snuff so even a handful of stealthy preachers can make a difference, especially if you prophetized your scout.
Having your god jumping around like a mad scarecrow can be quite disturbing for your opponent and even if he sees the domthreat he must still run after it, lest he loses all his precious territory.
You’ll find examples of that in the Corydalis and InversionsRedux MP games I attached at the end of this post.


Year 2-3:

Year 2-3 domwar is the most tricky and entertaining part. You should now have access to a burgeoning blood economy and hopefully reached construction 4 for a few jade knives.
Unless you were particularly efficient, you’ll have to wait for late year 3 to get a massive dompush from them. For now, you have to maximize your dominion inside your territory and start building facilities (ie. temples + forts if possible) on the border of your next domtarget.
The only research you need so far is construction 4, the rest should be mostly oriented towards battlemagic and globals to survive becoming public enemy n°1 soon after.
The reason for it is that unless you play with the graphs off, people will start being nervous/wary of your sudden dominion rise, even if you’re still not pushing toward them. Let’s say the truth, there will be some of it spreading toward them whether you want it or not. It even is a good thing as it will let you appraise your neighbors domstrength before the onslaught.

Always prey on the weakest, unless of course their territory stretches away from you, the best target being one clustered close to your temples with a low dominion.
Once you’ve decided which neighbour should be your prey you only need 3-4 turns ahead to plan your dompush. Send your stealthy preachers in advance if you’ve got some, craft JKs to equip each of your border sacrificers, prepare your pretender for war and make sure you have secured your bloodhunting facilities (patrols+forts if possible) for when retaliation comes.
On the turn you decide to dompush you should start to blood sac nearly everywhere on your territory. The JKs should be used on the border but even remote sacrifices will help. Even a tiny stream at the other end of the lake will help it spill over the barrage.

You need critical mass.

If you can’t have at least 5 times as many temple checks as your opponent in a 2 lands radius of your border, I advise you not to go for it. Wait and craft some more JKs and build more temples to sacrifice until you have the means of a short and efficient war.
Once the war has begun, your targets are the same as firemen. You need to get inside the building and look for the source to quench it.
Blood sacrifice is here to quench the fire on a large scale, your pretender and preachers should go for the sources: temples!
Burn them down…err, drown them. That is the second most important part after critical mass as once your candles replace his on these sources, all the rest shall dwindle on its own due to the overall pressure of your bloodsac. Remember that as long as he’s got friendly dominion on a province, it can spread to nearby provinces even if he’s got but a single candle on the source. Most annoying.
If you want your stealthy preachers to show any efficiency, cluster them on the temples. They’re definitely of no use alone. Meanwhile, your pretender should be flying to the hard-to-reach dominion pockets, remote temples and random domspread rekindling fire here and there. If you can teleport or fly several preachers behind the line to blood sac, do it.

I would not have you think this is as simple as it sounds; be aware that dominion contest has a non negligible random factor as most things in this game. When your opponent recognises the threat he should turn all his priests to preaching, which may be a good thing towards crippling his research and battlemagic if they happen to also be his mages. They should mostly be clustered in forts hence my advice to also cluster your stealthy preachers there to counter them, hopefully with unrest rituals to cover them.
I’ve read several times that preaching apparently applied before temple checks and was thus a poor counter to them. I don’t know for sure but what is sure is their poor efficiency…except at this part of the game when your blood sac capabilities are still burgeoning.

In all my games, year 2 dominion wars were the trickiest because each and every time I had my opponent seemingly dying every turn and still surviving with barely 1-2 candles rekindling here and there, supposedly preaching like hell to survive while my pretender air tanker flew to quench the last candles, my stealthy preachers clustered under his forts and sacrificers increasing their blood-crazy pace in the background. Until his final demise.

Meanwhile, you should now be facing heavy opposition from your other neighbours, either from the pleas of your target advocating to kill you before you’re out of control (he’s right), or simply because your dompush unwittingly spread and threatened them.

Diplomacy is the key here.

If you have secured all the NAPs you can by the time you start your domwar, this will be that many turns spared to you. If you can trick or motivate a remote player to attack one of your neighbours, the better. Remember, your war should be short (high max 8-10 turns) as you don’t need to besiege his forts to win, only to snuff his candles.
The counterpart is that once you have started your war on someone, whether you want it or not it’ll most likely end up with a war on everyone. Once your dompush will have domkilled him, you’ll have started threatening all your other neighbours with your dominion unless they also blood sacced.
This is why dompush should only ever be a side strategy. You should always have planned to be a power in your own right with the usual warfare tools. Battlemagics, thugs and troops should be ready. Not to invade your opponent (your dominion can do that), but to repel them -and also your initial target, you didn’t think he’d stand gaping while you domkilled him, did you?

The good point is that it only requires construction 4 to pull out your dompush which is usually part of any strat anyway. Beware that as a blood nation, you’ll have to rely on other stuff than blood, or at least diversify your means, as most of your slaves will end up on the altar. Refer to guides on your specific nation to survive.

To sum it up :
- Critical mass
- Go for the sources
- Diplomacy


Year 4-5:

If you survived this far in a medium-sized map, the victory should be at hand since your bloodsaccing capabilities are now at their highest, JKs all around and ultimately more temple checks generated each turn than the total number of provinces in the map. This is the threshold beyond which you’ll know you’ve won, when your dompush will start looking like a tidal wave, quenching even the hottest furnace.
Truth be told, bloodsaccing now outshines all other means of dompush and you can forget them altogether, except maybe spamming melancholia on resilient dominion pockets like capitals, where it’s risky to send your pretender or stealthy preachers.
If you can militarily repel the others, only a bloodsaccing nation can hold your dompush at bay at this point, and only then if he has a number of temples and starting dominion equivalent to yours.
Anyway, if it boils down to it, there should very rapidly be only you and him left on the map as the dompush threat would be multiplied for all the others. Then, the endgame should be endgame as usual between the two of you.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

4/ Counters:

Fight fire with fire. The best tools to use against this strat are the same as your opponent with some tweaks.

Critical mass: be humble. In most of my games, players either underrated the threat or had too much faith (ahem) in their preaching capabilities. If you’re not a bloodsaccing nation, you don’t stand a chance in the long run to counter you opponent with mere preachers. All you can achieve is to delay him. Still, you should thrive to do as it may be enough if you’re good at the two other tools.

Go for the sources: that is the most important part. Your opponent’s superiority lies in having the means to reach the critical mass.
First and foremost in your priority list should be raiding his bloodhunting sites to stop or lessen his bloodsaccing until he no longer has the critical mass necessary to domkill you.
If you achieve that goal, it should already be enough which is why I emphasized earlier that the would-be domkiller must first secure his bloodhunting facilities before going to war.
2d on the list should be the search and extermination of all those stealthy preachers : domes + patrols to find them despite the unrest rituals spammed on your head, mindhunt to kill those sneaky faithkillers wherever they hide.

Diplomacy: Domwars are short wars. If you want to achieve these goals before being domkilled, don’t try it alone is my best advice. You should stop listening to anyone obviously going for a dompush, that he’s no threat and blabla. Gang and kill him at once!
There’s a parallel with LA Ermor: if you let him pull out his strat unhindered, there’s a threshold beyond which all your efforts to stop him avail to nothing. Don’t let him reach that treeshold.

5/Nations:

Not every nation is well suited to make an efficient dompush, and even less a domkill.
It should be possible to domkill a weak opponent without these tools but if you have less than dom 9 and at least blood sacrifice, don’t even think of it as a reliable strategy.
Without blood sacrifice you won’t get it on any large scale anyway unless you’re far superior in size than your opponent and if you are, you should just kill him the old way.

Here’s a list of the blood sacrificing nations:
EA Marverni
EA Sauromatia
EA Mictlan
EA Abysia
EA Pangaea
EA Vanheim
EA Helheim
EA Hinnom

MA Abysia
MA Vanheim

LA Marignon
LA Mictlan
LA Abysia
LA Midgard
LA Gath

Of all these, the best suited to pull out a strong dompush is imho EA Pangaea: it’s got everything from PoD to blood sacrificers to cheap temples to stealthy preachers (flying turn1 stealthy prophet!) to easy access to jade knives and rains of toads. Alternatively, MA Abysia and Vanheim being the only two sacrificers of the era stand at a clear advantage.

6/ Examples of MP games:

InversionsRedux (starring Frozenlama, Lingchih, Militarist, Kianduatha, GraemeDice/Diceman, Sensori, Baalz and me) run recently on The Other Forum.
http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/...p?showtopic=24

I kind of screwed the game with a huge dompush as it was initially set up to test the EDS but it still remains as an example of this strat.
I played EA Pangaea with an awake dom10 D5 PoD.
We had an early war in year 1 with militarist/kailasa where I combined a pretender jumping around to snuff the candles and stealthy prophet/dryads under his capital. War over in 4 turns.
Later, GraemDice/Yomi felt threatened by my dominion and declared war which made me go for a strong dompush. I had a NAP with nearly everybody on the map at that time but the graphs made me an obvious threat and soon FrozenLama/Lanka came after me while I was holding Sensori/Niefelheim at bay with heavy diplo. At that point I also casted Gift of Nature and Gift of Nature’s Bounty which made me appearing even more threatening.
I tried to do 2 things at the same time: domkilling FL asap while trying to convince everybody I’d stop my dompush once I had. I even was genuine at start though retrospectively I stood a much better chance at winning with dompush. To give peace a chance I stopped all blood sacrifices on the Niefelheim/Oceania border and even funded some temples for Niefelheim. Anyway, I didn’t have the leisure to ponder which way to go as on the same turn I finished Lanka, Oceania and Abysia aggressed me. I then let my dompush run wild and the game was over 5 turns after, one nation falling to my dominion per turn on the last 3 turns.


Corydalis (starring Fantomen, Firewalker, Dark Kitty, ZZcat, Ghoul31, Folket, mscfish, Pyg, Tollund, Starshine Monarch, Herode and me), a few months ago 3.23 (graphs of the dead off unfortunately)
http://forum.shrapnelgames.com/showthread.php?t=44477

I also had an early war with Pythium which was over in 3 turns with my god+prophet attacking his capital by surprise and then my god flying to the few candles he had before he could retaliate. Then after dispatching Rlyeh and Jomon, I had a long dominion war with Gath/Pyg which was followed by the whole world turning on me.
There are 2 differences with InversionsRedux: firstly I had planned to play a domkill strategy as my main strat from the start and secondly I stupidly stopped it altogether by persuading myself it didn’t stand a chance in the late game. After eliminating more than half the players with my dompush I relied on my meagre military development when I got ganged by the remaining 3 (zzcat/Herode/Ghoul31) and sadly surrendered to zzcat by early year 5 who was a clear winner. With retrospect, I would have been hard pressed fending them off but with more experience in the dompush department I know now I stood a much better chance with it.




I hope some of you now realize how dominion war really is another nice way to enrich an already incredibly deep game. As everything not well understood it may seem overpowered to some until you understand the counters. I’d like nothing more than watching this whole aspect of the game being used more often, and people suffering from it adequately countering it for even more entertaining games.

If you found any interest in this (looong) guide, please send your thanks and good vibes to Sensori, Lingchih, GraemeDice, FrozenLama and all the players of InversionsRedux because:
- If it were not for them and our little drama, I don’t think I’d have roused myself to write this.
- It will help balancing my karma :)

If not, well…don’t bother ;)

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Corydalis and InversionsRedux files attached

Attachment 10235

Attachment 10236

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

I believe growth continues even under hostile dominion. Are you sure it does not?

I think you should consider adding Ea-arco, and possibly LA Pythium as nations that can dom kill. I think EA-Abysia is as strong a candidate for dom kill as pangea, possibly stronger. Abysia can take a H3D3 scale and not suffer much. Just have your blood stockpiled before you commence dom killing.

The easiest counter to domkill in most cases is to stop the harvesting of blood - so I think you should add a section about how much blood to stockpile.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

domkills are fun, i've actually won a few blitzes that way. mostly (perhaps all) with abysia of various eras.
EA aby does make a ncie dompusher; it has ups and downs compared to pan. it doesn't have easy jade knives; but on the plus side it has some of the games' best pd; and aby is pretty strong defensively, making it much harder for peopel to try to take out your temples.

Taking an awake (yes, awake) blood fountain can allow you to start a dompush very very early in a game (with the 3/turn slaves it gets under cbm), and can rather surprsie people. but this should only be done with a nation that, like aby, can handle early sc gods and other threats entirely with its national troops/mages; or you could take the fountain dormant, and get in time for a good mid-game push.
once you get a bunch of loser troops to patrol, a fountain and hunt yoru capital quite well, and bring in enough slaves to supply an entire early-mid game dompushing force on its own.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

I'm actually playing EA Arco in an MP game now, with a Dom10 Virtue pretender, partly in order to see if DomKill could be made part of my bag of tricks.

Dom spread without blood sacrifice is nowhere near as efficient. Baalz's Arco guide suggests besieging your enemy's big army in their cap, then rather than assaulting, surrounding them with temples. Sure, but that is just a trick to avoid a last pitched battle.

The trouble is that EA Arco has the firemen (heretics) and the flying 3-candle pretender, but lacks the firehose. This means that I have to track down every enemy candle and actively deal with it, I can't rely on my tidal wave of dominion to flush the small stuff.

Which brings me to my next question: How do you know where your enemy dominion is? My heretics are not good enough spies to always see the enemy dominion they are in. So I have a bunch of them hanging out in my enemy's territory, on the assumption that they are accomplishing something (and in fact their dom graph is going down). How can you see enemy candles?

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

aaminoff: get your candles next to the province, or own the province. Those are really the only ways.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

I was quite sure of it but I just tested it and you're right!
It may be the only scale which takes effect even under enemy dominion
Edited


Concerning EA ARco I have some doubt as blood sac really is the required tool to pull out this strat imho.
Preaching of any kind is a poor man's blood sac.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Exellent guide!

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Thanks. Very much appreciated :)

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

very nice guide. I do wonder however how you'd recommend to counter someone using such a powerful dominion push strategy if you aren't a blood sacrifice nation yourself. also, does the inquisitor bonus also counts towards blood sacrifice, say in Marignon's case?

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Well, regarding the counters look at the 4th section of the guide.
I don't think the inquisitor bonus counts toward blood sacrifice but it sure helps to counter it.
To say the truth, Corydalis was one of the first games where I pulled out the strat so efficiently and I thought at start it might be because of the inquisitor bonus but with more experience I can now say it doesn't look anything more than the usual blood sacrifice.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

DomKill is indeed heavily built into the game and I appreciate this thread.

Some nations are designed around domkill. And I dont just mean those with dominions that have deadly side-affects. When people discuss "weak" nations they often overlook some built-in balances in those nations. Stealth priests, strong priests, special pretenders or priests for dompush, and nations that get half-price temples come to mind.

And when nations that are "too strong" are discussed, their vulnerability to domkill is also often overlooked.

Even as far afield as the discussion of "good/bad" maps should bring it up. Such as, maps with large oceans destroys the ability of land nations to try and domkill water nations. A fairly necessary feature to the game IMHO.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Except, the stealth/strong priests, special pretenders and cheap temples aren't enough to do the job. Those special features can help defend against a dominion push and you may be able to leverage them to finish off a low-dominion nation or squeeze dominion out of a last for that you can't take by force, but full-fledged domkill really needs blood sacrifice.
Having higher level priests available helps with sacrifice as do cheap temples, but easy access to Jade Knives and good bloodhunters helps more. Stealth is largely irrelevant, since you can't sacrifice and hide.

As for these being hidden balance features, I don't really see much correspondence between "weak nation" and good at dompush or "strong" and vulnerable.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Also my belief that it is the only scale.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

How about Heat and Cold?

Assuming your nation has a preference, I'd assume you get the benefits of whatever temperature is actually present. Does Neifelheim get temperature based penalties in a Cold 3 province under enemy dominion?

Of course, temp is the odd scale, since both extremes are considered bad for most nations.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Nice question and after further testing it seems nations suffer from heat/cold the same whether it's friendly or enemy dominion.

Which means Niefelheim (which I tested) gets a better income and supplies under enemy cold dominion.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

If a nation likes +2 heat I like to take it to +3. I can handle what amounts to only a -1 heat hit on my units much better than enemies inside my territory can handle the +3. Especially since most of the temperature loving nations are cold-loving. AND especially with most of those being giants where I tend to need all the boosts I can get.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Great guide. I really enjoyed reading it :)

And:
If this is true then it really sounds like a bug, one that overpowers blood sacrifice vs. regular preaching.
Is it even listed as a bug in the bug thread?

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

I know that blood preaching does two temple checks. Fairly well tested - and due to the increased size of Dom3 maps probably a good idea.

However, I don't know that anyone has actually verified that regular temples only do 1 temple check. Empirically it seems true...

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

As an unwitting victim of this strategy (or witless victim, your choice), I can attest to the efficacy of it. In fact, I have banned the strat in the Inversions3 game, which is another test game for the EDM mod.

Nice guide Kheldron, and thanks for writing it up. I didn't really think you ever would. I initially thought of it as just a cheat way of winning, but that applied to InversionsRedux, where we were trying to test the new end game summons. In a regular game, I see it as a wholly viable way of winning, and I'll probably use it, if I get the chance.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

That was thoroughly tested by vfb in the post I linked and confirmed in my experience.
About overpower you can see it both way : preaching is so limited it wouldn't allow such a strat by himself.
Besides, it's not as if blood sacrifice didn't have a cost : besides being a world threat you more or less have to forswear those nice blood summons and ritual to pull out this strat. Ask Mictlan what they think of it...

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

The question is - is dom kill so good now (due to said bug) that it eclipses all blood summons?- If it's much better than all other usage of blood slaves then I'd say, yes it's OP.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

That's a difficult question. To answer truthfully I guess we have to look at the when and the how.

this strat clearly takes some time to pull out. It's not as if you could turtle and summon tarts until the point you just launch a terrifying onslaught and crush everyone in 2 turns because you make them surrender before your might.

Even if you carefully saved your blood slaves and jade knives until late game to dompush with a sudden and mighty strength, it would still take some time to :
- fill up your own provinces to fulldom
- domkill you immediate neighbors who then would have had much more time to fill up their own lands with candles ->harder/longer
- press forward if you survived the gang that would be WAY more dangerous than the one you'd have had in middle game

I may be wrong but waiting till late game to start dompushing would be more dangerous since a gang then would be more lethal than one in middle game, simply because in middle game, the threats come mainly from your immediate neighbors while those far away don't bother you much. Not so in late game where distance don't matter so much.

Anyway, if you manage to survive being public enemy n°1 in middle game, and in good shape, it certainly eclipses blood summons in medium-sized map imho.
Otoh, one of the main advantages of blood is often that you can play the underdog with it as you once could with gemgens, since blood slaves don't show on the graphs. This in turn allows you to get to those summons without looking too much of a threat to anyone until then.

Dompush really has a neat advantage in late game IF you first survive to its neat disadvantage in middle game of having everyone on your heels with some of your resources (blood/preachers/sacrificers) used on something else than warfare.

Is it OP? Imho no since it has a disadvantage on par with its advantage

But who am I to know for sure? :confused:

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

One of the advantages of dom push as a strategy

- you don't need a lot research
- you don't need a lot of military (hence not a lot of upkeep)

If you forfeit research - you can put a *lot* of blood hunters out.

Really, the issue is map size, and whether graphs are turned on, and finally whether opponents have spies out to see whats happening. Yes, I know they can't see dominion - but if a nation *dies* with military units in the field - good evidence of dom push.

I personally do not view most of the summons in the game as cost effective; I usually push a dom strategy as part of a military strategy - the defender is stressed to defend against both. Whichever he fails at you beat him over the head with.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Good old blood sacrificing. It is definitively bugged with the two checks per blood slave and if that's not on the bug shortlist, it should be. And due to this bug and the fact how preaching is weak, it is definitively overpowered. I am a bad person, since knowing all this I still tried to use it twice.

First time I was playing Sauromatia. I had two strong opponents - Rlyeh and TC, late game, everyone filled with gem gens. I started stockpiling slaves for the push, but the game ended by concession before I started. The point of this is that I would have a very very hard time defeating them militarily, since we were all about the same strength, but there was pretty much nothing they could do against the dom push. Two opponents in late game, roughly equal in strength, but where one has the option to blood sac are not nearly evenly matched.

Second time I took MA Pangaea. I wanted to make dominion push my main strategy. Nice cheap stealthy H2 priests, 200g temples, blood sac, I took vamp queen with high dom for the pretender to spawn an army of vampire lords. Then 20 turns into the game I realized that MA Pangaea cannot blood sac, it's only EA version that can do it. And then Vanheim became my main opponent and seeing my horde of vampire lords he started blood sacing to limit their effectiveness. Oh boy, was it hard to defend from this, even with my 200g temples and nice cheap priests. He would teleport a Van thug into my lands, then next turn summon a dark citadel there, build a temple and start blood sacing in the middle of my territory. My dominion started crumbling fast.

The best defense from this is to raid - constantly raid his blood hunters. Golems are nice, since they are immune to most blood spells and can teleport and return. Unrest spells are good. Assassination spells work well against some blood nations (Vans are pretty much immune to them). Revelers are also nice if you are Pangaea, but there are also other nations with spies and stuff. Blood hunters in castles are the toughest, but if you take the province during magic phase, they lose two turns of blood hunting. When you take the province their order are reset for the current turn and on the next turn when they regain the province the blood hunt order can't be issued.

When I put up the Gift of nature's bounty and started spamming temples and dryads everywhere, thing started looking better and I even managed to push his dominion back. A group of about ten dryads stealthy preaching on his castle was able to stop blood sac dominion spreading from there. I don't know what his dominion score was, though. But still, I had to overpower him in priests 10:1 to start fighting back.

Ideally what I think a patch should do is reduce the temple checks to one per slave and move preaching to the same step in the turn sequence as other dominion spread. That way preaching would actually be useful against blood sac.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Blood sacking only really works against nations where you have a substantial dominion advantage over them *and* the ability to leverage that dominion advantage. Against an opponent with well-entrenched dominion they have plenty of time to attack you militarily and destroy temples or disrupt bloodhunting before you come anywhere close to killing them.

2 checks/slave seems perfectly reasonable in that context. Its a way to kill someone you were already beating, and it uses valuable mage time and burns slaves. (Especially if you're doing enough blood sacrifice to matter, the cost in slaves per turn is stupendous). Remember you can't target dom spread.

Now, blood sacrifice is much better on smaller maps, and it much better on non-wrap-around maps. (You can fill a corner with dominion, which limits the direction future candles can propogate).

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

second that.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

As the Vanheim player Psycho referred to above I'll mention that I had a dominion of 7. Obviously not high enough that I was planning on a dominion kill victory but of course I intended it to be a tool - especially in the MA where there's only one other blood sac nation. My initial worry was actually MA C'tis and I did in fact start next to him and he did have a crazy strong dominion (if I didn't know better I'd swear it went to 11). When the province south of my cap switched to his dominion I decided it was time to started blood sacrificing earlier than planned.

Then when I saw Pan's horde of vampire lords (and that damn VQ) it became even more important. Interesting to hear how many dryads he had preaching because I was surprised when the blood sacrificing eventually failed to convert even some of the provinces where I had forts and was sacrificing. But certainly what finished me off was the destruction of my blood economy. Another thing that I think limited my sacrificing is that I had a string of provinces leading up to and through Pan's territory - I would preferred to have been able to face him with a solid block of provinces with my dominion maxed out.

Funny side note from that game is that I couldn't protect all my provinces from his raiding so I'd choose a few each turn to send anti-thug squads to. And I would almost always guess wrong. It got to the point where I didn't try to figure out where he would attack, I'd just randomly select provinces to defend. And I'd *still* be wrong. I still have a strong hatred of Rock the golem. ;)

Not sure if blood sac is OP but barring a patch changing the mechanics it seems a possible fix is removing jade knives or making them more expensive.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

I'll admit getting 2 temple checks/slave sounds weird, but I'd hesitate to suggest nerfing it.

It's hard to resist when someone gets the right setup, but is it really that common. Is a blood sac dom victory really a common thing? Or would nerfing blood sacrifice just make dom push a useless strategy?

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

I second that. It's not as if dompush didn't have costs and drawbacks.

otoh, it would be nice to make preaching better, maybe by moving its resolution later in the turn sequence.
It would help dompush as well as countering it so balance would be preserved but it'd actually make useful those tons of preachers.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

Is there a connection between population size and dominion spread? For me it would be logical if a 20000 people province changes faith/candles less fast than an 1000 people province. Does the game take population into account?

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

an interesting question. I never thought of it or read anything about it.
Intuitively and empirically I'd say no but it would be interesting to seriously test it.

Re: Domkill : The Power of Faith
 

The dom mechanics seem pretty clear and leave no room for a population effect. It wouldn't be the first time something in this game didn't work the way it was thought, but I don't expect it.