[PhilD]

Arralen said:
.. and it's the same way in Dom3:

Initial dominion strength govern how easy your dominion spreads: how often you get successfull "temple checks" which results in "dominion plopps" which travel around to settle down in some province which has less then max dominion.
Thats what you pay design points for!

This is not how Bruce understood it when he wrote the manual; his understanding (and mine, but then, my sources are what he wrote) is that building temples increases the chances of temple checks being successful.

Number of temples only governs the max number sacreds you can recruit, and up to which strength you can boost your local dom strength by preaching (which only raises it in the prov. the priest is in).

Here, at least, the part about how high preaching can take dominion is wrong. Number of temples (and starting dom) governs how high your dominion can go in any province,
no matter how. The limit for preaching is twice the preacher's Holy level (+1 if there is a local temple).

I have seen dom strength go higher then the "rated" strength from starting dom and temple numbers, therefore the max strength seems not to be capped directly any more.

This is not what the discussion is about; the question is whether the chance of each "temple check" being successful only depends on starting dominion, or on starting dominion and number of temples. The manual says it's starting dom and number of temples, and the in-game info you get when clicking on a temple seems to support this.