[Hellboy]

Stealthy preachers could be fun, though I haven't had a chance to try them out yet (I'm expecting to soon, however). I've been thinking it would be helpful to lower the enemy dominion in advance of my troops arriving.

I'm mostly focused on MP, but relatively new to it. One thing I can say is that my initial SP practice led me astray by undervaluing dominion on my pretender. For example, I like to play T'ien Ch'i with max luck, but in a recent game with only 3 dom on my pretender, I was very much at the mercy of everyone elses dominion in the early game.

That said, I still hate the idea of paying the pretender points for very high level of dominion (like 8-10). I feel that if I do that, then I'm weaking my end game since eventually I will get my dominion up to 10 anyhow, by buying temples. There are numerous exceptions to this "wisdom" (e.g. LA Ermor), but still I think the end game is strengthened by spending less on dominion and more on scales or magic for the pretender.

So, as a player that prefers low-ish dominion (and I'd never go as low as 3 again, I guess I'll favor dominion in the 5-7 range, going forward), I like to build temples and recruit preachers. I make it a priority to put the temples and the preachers on borders of nations that have very destructive scales, and then after that I try to put temples in my rear areas, where they are (hopefully) less vulnerable to attack.

Once I have a temple, I try to preach up to dominion 3 with one or more preachers and then move the preacher(s) on to some other province. If the hostile dominion is very strong and/or my dominion is still weak, I do sometimes leave a single preacher (but never more than one) in a dominion 3 province.

If you are using this kind of method in MP play, you have to expect that you're going to lose some of your temples to a skilled opponent. As such, I always build temples in forts, and as the game goes on I try to get an ever increasing number of forts. Personally, I like playing long term games on big, spacious maps, so I'm sure that affects my priorities. In this kind of game, cash has always been plentiful in the end game and its gems that are the critical resource. As such, I never feel too bad if I lose some temples to Ghost Riders, or whatever other attacks the opponent cooks up, and I usually find it easy to rebuild temples as I need them (preferably in newly conquered enemy territory!).