dominion spread

[Coldshard]

Ok, so I've read over the dominion spread info in the manual but in a test game I just ran something odd happened..

I was testing out killing off a foe using dominion spread. Side A had side B reduced to two keep provinces only, and they were several spaces apart. The one without an opposing pretender I parked my prophet, a temple, and my pretender god next to (far side relative to the direction of the line connecting side b's provinces). No preaching was performed by either side.

The dominion scale for each side started at 7, and side A had 7 temples total while side B had 1 temple in the same province as their pretender.

After a couple of rounds the scales sat with the side A province at 8 while side B's fortress was at -6.

After about 4 rounds of no change I decided to start constructing Juggernaughts in order to test how they sped up the dominion spread.

At 1 Juggernaught a round it took until side A had 20 Juggernaughts before the side B's keep dominion dropped to -5. Side A was up to 35 Juggernaughts before side B's keep became +3.

I noticed that most of the world had become +3 at this point. Sea provinces, distant lands, and everything except for side B's pretender keep (which was at -1) was at a positive value.

I realize that dominion spread is random, but this seems a little crazy! An enemy keep surrounded by friendly dominion with many checks a round against a foe with a stronger effective dominion scale that was not trying to defend its own dominion in any way... and it only lost its dominion a few rounds before the pretenders keep gave out which was a pretty long ways away!

So do keeps generate extra dominion or resist changing to opposing dominion? Why were provinces that did not have active preaching seemingly maxing out at 3 dominion?