[GavinWheeler]

I'd definitely reconsider your pretender. Mictlan has a cool variety of sacred mages, so you can rely on them to allow you to cast lots of funky spells.

Mictlipoctli, for example, is a very accomplished necromancer, and can summon more, so why have a pretender with death magic?

Personally, I like a pretender with Earth and Blood magic. Earth is one school missing from those normally available to Mictlan, and the ability to (eventually) summon demon knights plugs the lack of heavy cavalry in a nicely thematic manner. Additionally, the reinvigoration blessing from Earth magic is far more useful to your sacred mage than Death's fear aura effect. If you want fearful troops, just summon them.

Edit: I forgot your other questions, and I thought I'd add that even if your starting fortress sucks badly, you can save up to cast "Three Red Seconds" or "Wizard Tower" to get another kind of fortress on a particularly juicy or vulnerable province.

When sacrificing, the level of your priest limits the number of slaves you can sacrifice. Each slave sacrificed spreads Dominion like a temple, so sacrificing two slaves is twice as effective as sacrificing one. The priest will sacrifice as many slaves as he has in his inventory, up to his maximum level - so a level 4 priest will sacrifice 4 slaves if he has at least 4 slaves in his personal magic gem supply. If he only has 3, he will only sacrifice 3. The nice thing is that if he is in a province with a laboratory, he will then replenish his supply of slaves from the ones stored in the laboratory. So a level 4 priest who is started off sacrificing with three slaves in his inventory will continue to sacrifice three slaves every round until you tell him otherewise or he runs out of slaves (there are none in the lab, or you use the 'pool' facility to pool all bloodslaves, including his).

Dominion will spread symmetrically (more or less) out from where the sacrificing is taking place. So if you want to push dominion into a particular area, sacrifice in or near that area.

Search on this bulletin board and you should find a very informative document about how dominion and dominion spreading works.

[ March 28, 2004, 16:30: Message edited by: GavinWheeler ]