[The Panther]

Hey! Thanks, tuidjy, for your helpful post above. Here I am on Turn 95 (I just checked this) and I gleamed some useful things from your post that I can still even use in my game!

As for the dominion thing, I surely expected my neighbors to come crashing down on me early with my 10 starting dominion. But they did not, though maybe this was partially due to a bit of luck.

One of my neighbors was a total rookie and he went AI early and quite unexpectedly. Another neighbor started a war in the other direction, eliminating Ermor early (as can be typical). Caelum expanded quickly and built lots of temples, thus keeping my 10 dominion away from him, and we had an armstice for a long time.

My other near neighbor was Norfleet (yes, the game started THAT long ago) who went AI on about turn 10 or so after he got caught cheating. Cohen quickly made a beeline for Norfleet's former empire and eliminated him at once. But, by that time, I had a nice solid empire in the middle of Karan, and used my incredible income bonus from my massive dominion to make a lot of mages of all types and sizes and fortify every single province with Hill Fortresses, labs, and temples.

I suppose that this will not always work out so well as it did for me, though, so taking a lower dominion might be prudent. But on a small map like Karan, it can be problematic building your dominion up from 6 to 10 in order to reap the full Miasma income bonus.