[Murph]

Early in the game, I don't find province defence to be that important. But when I first started playing Dom2, I was trying to garrison provinces, each with a little defensive army. This DOES NOT WORK.

I tend to defend my borders in 2 ways, first, I try to have castles within one province of my borders. This is not always possible, but is to be tried for. Then, keep a decent reaction force at your border castle. If enemy armies come up to your border, you can try to anticipate and intercept them.

Buy a bit of province defence in your border provinces to buff up your rapid response force and prevent pesky Call of the Winds or Wolves or Whatevers from taking your provinces, but don't pay big money unless it's a very important province or a chokepoint.

The other way to defend your provinces is to go kill enemy armies. If your enemies have no troops, they cannot conquer your provinces.

People who play Ermor or Carrion Woods have a different technique, wherein they kill pretty much everyone in the provinces they control. At that point, you *CAN* conquer their areas, if you have enough food with you, but a fat lot of good it will do you.

My recommendation to you, as I recall from playing Ulm as a newbie (well, more of a newbie) is, build armies, go after enemy castles (Ulm knocks down castles like nobody else) and focus on killing their armies. Province control is important, but not essential. And experiment with priests and spreading Dominion, that is actually more useful, IMO.