Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

A brief one, since I suspect I know the answer (as in, there's not much more I can do...)

I have taken a province on my borders. The enemy dominion there is #9. Is there really much more I can do than I already have done? I preach, I build temple, I blood sacrifice, (so far --- several turns) nothing has moved it one iota in my direction. I have dominion level 5-ish for my start-up.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

An army of preachers can't hurt. Though I don't know enough of the game's mechanics to tell you whether or not it helps.
Just keep conquering provinces, smashing enemy temples, and making your own.
It'll start to go down eventually.
De-paganizing never happens over night.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

The chance for changing dominion 1 toward you are (30% * priest level) - (5% * enemy dominion). Thus, lv 1 priests are worthless against 6 dom, and close to worthless against anything but very low enemy dom. So priest spamming isn't always very potent.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Preachers preaching on top of a temple get +1 level in preaching effectiveness I believe.

Part of the reason for your problem could be that enemy dom is coming out enmass (especially if he's in a corner, or just have a well-consolidated empire), especially if the province in question is geographically a focal point.

Playing lots of water nations I hit on this problem a lot as narrow water strips are almost all focal points to dom spread, I've had 20 lvl 2 priest (lvl 3 with temple) preaching in a focal water without raising dom at all, but then there are probably 10+ enemy dom pushing into it every turn

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Do you have access to inquisitor? That could tip it for you. An inquisitor profit can turn things around. You can also give him the Sword of Injustice, the Sword of Justice, or maybe the ark. Or the stone idol.
Or bring in a bunch of Juggernaughts.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

If you take a few provinces past this one, you'll be better able to destroy it. Until then, anything that reduces the dominion in general can work. A scout of some sort with a stone idol equipped could get a start on this, then move into enemy dominion and weaken it from other, possibly enemy, provinces.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Thank you, guys, about what I thought.

Unfortunately, I do not have access to any of the forgeries mentioned (nor the inquisitors). It's a small map, so there's no other room for me to expand from/to. The province is a choke point. I've built a fortress there.

I have kept my God there for a turn (I know he counts toward my overall conversion rate) does him being in a province actually help convert that province (given that he is not a priest)? I don't like him/Prophet being there for long, as the bad dominion reduces him to to just 1 HP!

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

who're you playing as?
it'd help us to know your options.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Hang on: I'm a blood nation [Vanheim] (for the first time). Although I've tried it a bit, just how much difference will blood sacrificing make? My God is #6, much higher than my other guys. Trouble is, I need him to do too many other thnings! And like I said, I don't like him being so vulnerable there.

I guess, like you said, because it's a choke, there's still enemy dominion touching up to it on the other side. So I presume that means that even if I succeed the other side is just a s likely to push new dominion back in, so i get nowhere.

If it were as easy as just "taking a few provinces past this one", I wouldn't be asking the question in the first place!

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

(if I understand the rulebook correctly :) )

Blood sacrifice makes a huge difference because it makes temple checks. Again, assuming that you've got a dominion of 6, for each sacrificed blood slave you get 60% chance of raising dominion, no matter what dominion the province has.

With jade knife and a few priest level , and 3-4 priest you might get 12 chances to raise dominion in a single turn.

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.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

This is indeed what the manual says, but in fact doesn't work like this. Testing has shown that temple checks only take starting dominion into acount to calculate their chance to produce a candle, so if you've started with a very low base dominion there's often little you can do besides learning to live inside enemy dominion.

As for this particular situation, I'm not very fond of trying to tackle big enemy dominions with preaching, it just requires a massive amount of effort for mediocre gain. (Unless your research force consists of strong mage-priests and your research is finished already.) I would look first not at the province in question, but the adjacent provinces in your empire, (What is the dominion there like now? Also in (lower) enemy dominion?) and get dominion there as high as possible, so all the dominion spreading outward from your lands has a good chance to spread further into the offending province.

More in general, blood sacrificing is indeed the king when it comes to pushing your dominion, nothing else gets you nearly as much bang for your buck.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

I take your point about maybe the Prophet, despite the bad dom.

As for temples, problem is it's a small map, I start from a corner, I only have 7 provinces before bottle-neck one.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

That is very significant, thank you.

As I said just above, it's a small map so we're only talking 7 provinces I have. It makes "pushing" more difficult!

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Anyway, for those interested, I seem to have reduced enemy dom from #9 down to #1 now :) It's taken a few turns, but I've been preaching (prolly makes not a lot of a difference) and sacrificing with B2 +1boost +Jade Knife each turn, so hopefully that proves sacrifice is doing it's job!

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

first of all, the booster on the blood guy does nothing. if anyone is interested, a very in depth discussion of domspread mechanics can be found here:http://z7.invisionfree.com/Dom3mods/...pic=233&st=105

i suggest you mainly just read calahan's stuff since in the end he was the one who was right about basically everything.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Jon,

The preaching does help. As I understand it, preaching gives you temple checks and blood sacrifices give you temple checks. It is just that you can usually get more temple checks, per gold spent, from sacrifices. Total how many checks you got from sacrifices each turn and how many preaching generated checks you had, then divide by one of those to get the percentages. Of course, that would be a bit anal! The point is that both methods do the same thing, just in different ways and at different costs. What did the job for you depends on which tool you used the most.

Now that you have it so low, you will quickly see it flip over your way and you can return to crushing the enemy in your favorite fashion!

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Saxon, nope like the manual says, preaching works differently. It does not give temple checks. It helps if you read the whole thread. The mechanics make it almost impossible for low level priests to remove high dominion.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

But, now that enemy dominion is almost gone, they will speed things up considerably. (lvl 1 priest with a temple in the province has 60% chance - 5%/enemy candle = 55% of succesful preaching, lvl 2 priest even 85%.) Basically, dominion war for this particular province is won now.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

I don't know, in SP games I've seen dominion fluctuate pretty rapidly

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Priest checks happen before the other domspread (dunno about vs blood sacrifice, though). So what you see the dom at when you give the order is what your priest will be up against.

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Of course, you are right. My bad: I keep forgetting that for sacrifice blood level/boosters are irrelevant, it's only holiness that counts! So I should have said, a level #2 priest + jade knife(=+2): I shall verify that he is 4 virgins light after next turn :)

While we are on the subject of virgins: I know hunting increases unrest. But what it ought to do, additionally, is reduce (pop) growth --- surely a reduction of eligible young maidens would cause that down the line?

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

It does. It's not massive, but certainly noticeable. (Don't recall if I ever checked out the exact formula) From previous experience I seem to remember that Growth 3 (Or possibly 2?) is enough to balance out the population loss from bloodhunting, but with less growth your population drops. (Of course, if you patrol to get rid of unrest rather than just dropping taxes population loss is a lot bigger.)

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Thanks guys, for weighing in on this. Calahan's writeup looks exhaustive, and ideally should probably be included somewhere like the Strategy Index or the Wiki. Until it winds up somewhere like that, I think I'll need to bookmark that link. :)

Re: Enemy dominion too high for me?
 

Drops by 2 per bloodslave found, rounds up to the nearest 10. I calculated how large a province would have to be to remain stable (on average) a while back, with 2-3 b2 bloodhunters, tax100 and patrolling and it was something like 13k+ with G3 scales.