[JimMorrison]

Well first, this game is all about different options, different strategies/tactics, and different abilities. So it's not "wrong" to have an imprisoned pretender, it just severely limits your own flexibility, and your understanding of the game, if you only play in the one fashion.

Now that we have that out of the way, just a note, blesses are not "automatic", there are sacred units, but only your prophet is constantly blessed, all other sacred units must be blessed during combat, and then it only lasts for the duration of that combat.

Dominion 10 isn't an end all be all trick. It works especially well for a pretender who already has Awe, as they stack, making it incredibly powerful in mitigating damage from most troops other than mindless units that have 30-50 morale. It does not work like fear, other than that the roll is taken against Morale. However, every unit MUST make an opposed roll of their Morale, vs your (Awe + 10) when they try to attack you. If they fail their roll, they fail to make an attack in that round. This is so valuable mostly in the early game, where a properly selected pretender can take 1 province every turn from the very start of the game, drastically increasing your expansion rate, giving you the economic base to crush people in the mid game and beyond.

This is a trade off, awake pretenders cost a LOT of design points (as points not gained by choosing dormant of imprisoned). But placing those points into scales, is for many nations much more of a mid game benefit, so if you don't have a strong early game growth plan, the player who has poor scales and an awake pretender will probably be so much larger than you, that they win the war 9/10 of the time against you, and probably with acceptable losses.

Then the third option, is to go for a bless strategy. Some nations make powerful use of blesses, some do not benefit from them much at all. You can sometimes do a single greater bless with a dormant pretender (and in a few cases it's possible with awake, but your scales will be AWFUL), but you will generally have to go imprisoned to do a dual bless. Often it works well to do a greater bless with a minor bless (usually the minor is nature for small regen, but not always), and in those cases you can typically just be dormant and still have -mediocre- scales.

In Dominions, if you try to fortify and shore up your position on a constant basis, your economy will bleed out, and you will grow far too slowly to be a threat to anyone later in the game. Perhaps they will avoid you because the reward for the effort is small, but you will never win that way, because someone far more aggressive than you will win much more quickly.


Typically, most games seem to be won through one or the other strong early game strategies - either they have an awake pretender who can make their empire grow twice as fast as you grow, or they imprison with a strong dual bless, and have incredibly powerful (and somewhat replenishable) sacred troops produce the same effect. This is why you hear so much about these things, because in MP, a "slow and steady" economic win through good scales and (nonstrategic) magic diversity, is not very common at all.


Hope that helps somewhat.

And remember, if you don't like that, there is no shame in just sticking with SP for the more laid back fun of the game, it's the route my roommate is taking, in fact.