Two questions on preaching

[Arryn]

Originally posted by PvK:
I notice that provinces near enemy dominion have a lower level that "can't be raised any higher by preaching". My guess has been that every nation can have dominion in every province, and they subtract from each other somehow, in a slow process from turn to turn, and that dominion also slowly spreads from province to province.

Enemy dominion works to lower your current dom, but it does not change the "cap". If the priest has holy-2, then you should be able to preach to that level (though enemy dom may prevent you from making any headway). I have spread dom up to and beyond my priest's level by building temples at my enemy borders, then letting the temple's own effect continue to boost dom level after my priests reach their own (and then they move on to other provinces to repeat the procedure). If you are unable to counter the effect of enemy dom so that you can preach up to your max, then you must have a low dom score for your pretender (and not enough temples overall to boost it). Or you need to throw more priests at the problem. I have never seen a message saying I cannot preach further until my priest does, indeed, hit his displayed max. OTOH, I also control provinces I preach in (unless I'm sieging). With Dom-10, I can siege a keep with the enemy god inside it and still move the balance in that province in my favor, though it may take months to go positive. All of this leads me to believe that your overall core dom value affects the effectiveness of your priests.

As for spread effects, they seem confined to adjacent provinces to your own dominion "generators". It also seems that a province that has high dominion will "spill" some of it over into adjacent provinces, even if that high-dom province itself has no temple or priest. Or at least that's the ripple effect I've been noticing. But the ripple appears much weaker than the effect of temples in pushing dom outwards.