My pretender died for no reason!

[ceremony]

Meglobob said:
I believe the dom3 manual to be spot on in exactly how dominion works/spreads.

The manual is definitely right for Dom3. When I referred to "being changed later" I was only talking about Dom2, and then only for part of Dom2, since at one point the mechanics were the same as Dom3. I never recall dominion working differently in either game, so I'm just taking Graeme's word for it that IW posted differently at one point for Dom2.

[Graeme Dice]

Meglobob said:
I play alot of games with dominion 9 or 10 and my dominion spreads like wildfire, so I would say every temple check I have is at 90% with 9 or 100% with 10.

That's not what the question is about. The question is about the behaviour of temples compared to the starting dominion strength. In dominions II, if you took a starting dominion strength of 1, then your temples never had more than a 10% chance to spread dominion, regardless of how many temples you had built. My question was whether the devs changed this for Dom3, or if they left it the same as in Dom2.

I found the thread where they mentioned this. It's at
Dominion Spreading Effects

[Arralen]

.. and it's the same way in Dom3:

Initial dominion strength govern how easy your dominion spreads: how often you get successfull "temple checks" which results in "dominion plopps" which travel around to settle down in some province which has less then max dominion.
Thats what you pay design points for!

Number of temples only governs the max number sacreds you can recruit, and up to which strength you can boost your local dom strength by preaching (which only raises it in the prov. the priest is in).

I have seen dom strength go higher then the "rated" strength from starting dom and temple numbers, therefore the max strength seems not to be capped directly any more.

[PhilD]

Arralen said:
.. and it's the same way in Dom3:

Initial dominion strength govern how easy your dominion spreads: how often you get successfull "temple checks" which results in "dominion plopps" which travel around to settle down in some province which has less then max dominion.
Thats what you pay design points for!

This is not how Bruce understood it when he wrote the manual; his understanding (and mine, but then, my sources are what he wrote) is that building temples increases the chances of temple checks being successful.

Number of temples only governs the max number sacreds you can recruit, and up to which strength you can boost your local dom strength by preaching (which only raises it in the prov. the priest is in).

Here, at least, the part about how high preaching can take dominion is wrong. Number of temples (and starting dom) governs how high your dominion can go in any province,
no matter how. The limit for preaching is twice the preacher's Holy level (+1 if there is a local temple).

I have seen dom strength go higher then the "rated" strength from starting dom and temple numbers, therefore the max strength seems not to be capped directly any more.

This is not what the discussion is about; the question is whether the chance of each "temple check" being successful only depends on starting dominion, or on starting dominion and number of temples. The manual says it's starting dom and number of temples, and the in-game info you get when clicking on a temple seems to support this.

[Graeme Dice]

PhilD said:
The manual says it's starting dom and number of temples, and the in-game info you get when clicking on a temple seems to support this.

The in-game info in Dom2 also indicated this, which is the problem here. My issue is that Illwinter provided Bruce with the information on dominion spread for Dom2, information that they later realized was incorrect. Bruce at first indicated that he had used this information in writing the Dom3 manual, which leads to the question of whether the dominion spreading mechanism matches the manual, or matches Dom2.

[Twan]

Can't see why awe has been added for high starting dominions if starting dominion is still the only number used for dominion spread.

[KissBlade]

Twan said:
Can't see why awe has been added for high starting dominions if starting dominion is still the only number used for dominion spread.

I don't think awe was the most balanced reward for a high starting dominion but in dom II, taking dominion really wasn't that rewarding.

[curtadams]

I just ran a test and can confirm that building more temples does NOT increase the chance of a successful dominion check. I took an imprisoned Dom 1 pretender, made no prophet, and built 9 additional temples (for 10). That "should" give a 30% check chance. But in 6 turns, with 11 checks per turn (10 temples plus home province), I got 5 pops. That's 200 times more likely if additional temples do not increase the chance of each dominion check, so we can pretty much conclude that I was still getting 10% dominion checks even with 10 temples.

[PhilD]

Yeah, I was thinking of doing something like this, but wasn't sure how to run the test. Are you sure there was no interference from opponents' dominion? (unlikely if the map was big enough)

[curtadams]

I took a large map and only one, easy, opponent. His dominion did reach my provinces but it didn't reach the area I had dominion in (due to my low dominion, no prophet, and no pretender, only 7 of 30 or so of my provinces had my dominion, so I had a good neutral buffer).