Enemy dominion too high for me?

[Amhazair]

Originally Posted by Hrum

All those added temples also increase your effective dominion from whatever the base dominion level was that you designed for your pretender. So in the example with 20 provinces, if you had a base dominion of 6 you now have an effective dominion (20 temples/5 = +4 to base dominion) of 10. Which makes those temple checks 100% likely (effective dom * 10% = chance of candle produced?) of producing +1 candle each not counting resistance from any dominion on your borders.

This is indeed what the manual says, but in fact doesn't work like this. Testing has shown that temple checks only take starting dominion into acount to calculate their chance to produce a candle, so if you've started with a very low base dominion there's often little you can do besides learning to live inside enemy dominion.

As for this particular situation, I'm not very fond of trying to tackle big enemy dominions with preaching, it just requires a massive amount of effort for mediocre gain. (Unless your research force consists of strong mage-priests and your research is finished already.) I would look first not at the province in question, but the adjacent provinces in your empire, (What is the dominion there like now? Also in (lower) enemy dominion?) and get dominion there as high as possible, so all the dominion spreading outward from your lands has a good chance to spread further into the offending province.

More in general, blood sacrificing is indeed the king when it comes to pushing your dominion, nothing else gets you nearly as much bang for your buck.