[onomastikon]

Wow, that was fast, thanks for those replies.

Especially @endoperez: Thanks for that preaching info. My question is, however, related to the MAXIMUM candle count by which a priest can still preach. In dom2, standard vanilla priests were level 2. IIRC they could
have a chance to raise the dominion by 1 via preaching if the current domionion in their province was 1 or lower, 2 if there was a temple present.
Now, they are level one, and everybody else is lower respectively. Does that mean that they can only effectively preach when the dominion is 0 (1 if temple present)? THat is the nature of my question, since it would greatly affect those priests' roles who do not have mage or fighting ability.
(In the demo, I got conflicting messages: Once, I noticed that my priest of level 3 (I think it was my prophet) was able to raise the dominion of the province, although there were 4 candles in it. Well I dont know if he did raise it, but I did NOT get the messsage "unable to raise dominion by preaching" when I hit "P".

Do temples, labs, and forts all cost the same amount of gold and build time in all the different ages?

Are you saying that gem cost for forging and path requirements are now decoupled? (So that path-1 could be 5 gems or could be 10? I think I saw a Lucky Coin shield cost 10 gems, but maybe I was mistaken.) That would be very nice IMO. But maybe I misunderstood your post.

And when I hit "view battle", the screen *does* zoom in from map to battlefield in a blend-in kind of way, but it goes black for some time before that. (So if 10 battles happened per turn that I can view, I sometimes decided not to view quite a few out of impatience)

Anyhow, thanks for the replies. If I understand you all correctly, however, then the main point (AI) still seems to be quite shaky. Good to know! thanks