Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?

[Alneyan]

Endoperez said:
Every 5 temples give you one more point, but IIRC it only helps to stop enemy dominion from invading, not to spread your dominion, or has some other similar limitation.

If memory serves, these points will not help Dominion spread at all, but they will raise your maximum Dominion value by Dominion spread. So, if you picked 5 at Pretender creation, and built 25 temples, all your provinces can reach Dominion 10 automatically; only that will make it harder to push your Dominion, since +10 is harder to override than +4.