[shatner]

I have a question about dominion flow. I know that when a temple in province X generates a candle it checks if the candle "settles" in province X (with a 10 candle dominion having a 0% chance of another candle settling there). If it doesn't settle then the candle randomly flows to an adjacent province and the process repeats itself. But is there a limit to the number of provinces a candle will try to settle in before it gives up?

Say you have a circular empire that covers 100 provinces. Say that each province you control already has 10 candles of friendly dominion but all the provinces bordering your empire have 0 candles. Now, say the only temple in your entire empire, tucked away in the very center-most province, generates a candle. In theory that candle will have to do a lot of random bouncing to reach any province with a dominion of less than 10. My question is, are we guaranteed that the candle will continue to bounce around until it reaches a viable destination or will it stop after so many attempts?

I ask because I'm wondering if the temples in the center of a large empire can still push that nation's dominion beyond their borders. I won an MP game recently where I had a large number of temples (something like 30 of them, with an effective dominion strength of 14) but it didn't feel like my dominion was pushing outward as much as I would have expected (even when I was hemmed in by enemy dominion, the odds of me lowering that dominion were, according to the formula in the manual, pretty darn good). If candles "die" after trying 5 provinces (for example) than that explains my experience. If not, I'm not really sure what was going on.