[Panpiper]

I remember having the same problem when I first started playing Dom2. In fact I lost my first game because of it. (I had not yet read the manual.)

After reading up on what had happened I made sure that my next pretender had a higher dominion than just one. I went for dominion three. (Veterans will now laugh.) However that actually worked for me given what else I did. The first leader I bought on turn one was a priest. He moved into the first conquered province and built a temple. Then he started preaching and the new temple built another priest (freeing the capital to produce researchers,etc.). That new priest built another temple in the next conquered province while still more priests got recruited in the temples. Essentially, I build a temple in every province and put priests in any province that can benefit from preaching and have them preach.

I wind up with a lot of priests. However I also ultimately equip them with Rods of the Phoenix, Spirit Helms, Elemental armor and Clams of Pearls (I play Ulm with a rainbow pretender finding lots of gem sites and I love my empowered smiths). I build labs wherever I station priests. I wind up with armies of priests casting incinerate and automatically launching volleys of lightning in addition to their casting. Needless to say I fear no undead or demons (or much else for that matter). Ulm lacks diverse magic casters and has no holy troops (letting me get away with a rainbow pretender and drain 3). However the forge bonus smiths (not affected by drain) with all my rainbow found gems allow me to field truly awesome numbers of Rods of the Phoenix and Spirit Helms which completely compensate for the lack of blessable troops and diversified spell casting.

The drain 3 helps me in that it does not hurt my guys given my strategy but can really mess with enemy spell casters. However the fight needs to be under the influence of my dominion for the drain to have effect. This can be difficult given my meager starting dominion (nowadays typically four or five). A trick I like is to give stealthy scouts a Stone Idol and send them into enemy territory to reduce the enemy's dominion, making it that much easier for mine to spread. If I worry about the scout getting caught and killed I also give him an Armor of Virtue so if he takes any damage, he T-ports back to my capitol. I also like to station Juggernauts on the borders of my territory (Juggernauts act as much on dominion as do prophets).

As for armies growing fast, it seems to me that the AI always favors going for large numbers of cheap troops while I the player always favor small numbers of very survivable elite troops (nobody beats Ulm for that). The difference in numbers can get quickly extreme. I always make sure to have at least my best leader always with a maximum compliment of those elite troops. That gives me one army that can come close to matching numbers. Their eliteness allows that army to utterly crush whatever it meets and come through virtually unscathed (troops gain experience and troops in this army gain experience fast). They can then crush another AI stack. The AI may build lots of cheap troops but with them loosing a stack every turn, it doesn't add up to much. (When I can, I equip that leader with O'al Kan's Sceptre and a Crown of Command so I can add another 100 troops and the Sword of Aurgelmer to give luck to all his army. I also give him the Chalice so his troops aren't overly hampered by afflictions. This army fears nothing.)