Two questions on preaching

[onomastikon]

I have the feeling that preaching doesnt seem to raise my dominion at all. Or at least I dont notice it. Does anyone know how it works exactly -- do I need to do it three turns in a row? Or a number of turns equal to the priest's level?

Maybe this is common knowledge, but I was experimenting: A sneaking sage in an independent province / enemy province cant search for magic sites, it apparently counts as an attack on the country (odd), but a sneaking priest CAN preach! But does this work the same way that preaching in your own province does (however that may be -- s. question 1)?

Btw, does having the "sneaky" symbol have any effect on the battlefield?

thank you

[General Tacticus]

As far as I know :

- Preaching has a chance of success equal to your God dominion * 10%. So if you gave your God Dominion 6 at the start, preaching has a 60% chance of success.
- Every five temples you build raises this chance by 10%
- If it succeeds, your dominion in this province goes up by 1
- Preaching can't raise the dominion of a province above the preacher holy (or unholy) score. A lvl 2 priest can only preach to level 2. You get a message ("XX cannot raise the dominion of the province any higher") if you try to preach but can't raise the dominion (but the order to preach stands).
- If you put a priest on "preach" order, and leave him there, and he hits his limit, you won't see any message, and he'll keep preaching without further effect.

And finally :
- preaching in an enemy province makes your priest more likely to be discovered, but can be done. Searching in an enemy province can't be done, but don't ask me why...

[onomastikon]

Thank you. That the success rate of a preach is dependent on the Dominion set and is affected by number of temples I hear for the first time, and is interesting indeed. This goes towards "what good Dominion setting" is for.

So the success of a preaching is not dependent on skill / power of priest, also interesting. Thanks.

[johan osterman]

Temples and prophets raise dominion the way Tacticus explained. Priests do not. Priests raise in some other way whose mechanisms I do not remember exactly, it is something like x+(priest lvl)y%. Where I do not recall the values of x and y. A high lvl priest also gains a chance of an additional raise, IIRC. Priests cannot however raise the dominion above their priest lvl.

Why should one be able to sneak search for sites? From a game mechanis perspective there certainly is little or no reason, since the sites one finds only benefit the owner. And argued from some sort of realism perspective either is as viable as the other, as there is no definitive authority on how mages go about searching for magic sites, as far as we know they might need to pound on enormous bells or light huge bonfires. It would also be odd if the owner of the province suddenly recieved a site he had not searched for from a searcher he did not know was there. The alternative would be to implement another layer of ownership on sites, but this is a lot of work for little or no benefit, complete with a whole new range of possible bugs and problems. Sneaky preach on the other hand can be useful when used against other players, and if you want an in game justification assume that they are preaching at secret meetings and handing out religous pamphlets and spray painting the religious slogans of their faith on enemy church walls.

Edit: Changed the * to a + in the formula.

[ January 18, 2004, 12:26: Message edited by: johan osterman ]

[onomastikon]

Grr ok ... darn, I sort of *liked* the way Gen Tacticus explained it and felt I could deal with that. Anyone know how it works / how do you know Gen Tact isnt right?

I didnt realize sneaky searches would be hard to implement; wouldnt it be kind of easy for you to know "found site in XYZ" but the current owner wouldnt get that message and no one would get the gems?

[General Tacticus]

Oh, I'm sure he's right : he's one of the developpers of the game