H2 priests: Why, when, how?

[Baalz]

Yeah, it's a swing of 4 for your troops for the reasons outlined, but in *addition* it's a swing of -2 for the enemy troops (from +1 friendly to -1 hostile dominion), for a net difference of 6 in your relative morale. As pointed out, this really makes a big difference in close fights where generally the morale on both sides is an issue. If you're concerned about who breaks first, that -2 to their morale is as significant as the +4 to yours.

That is, of course, if you accept the premise that you're fighting in friendly dominion because of the priest. I fully agree that is not the case all that often, but there is one particular case where it is very common, and is well illustrated by my bloody nose in Beardaxe that Jazzepi just brought up. A relative swing of 6 is a staggeringly huge difference in your PD. In this case I made several sneak attacks on Arco with Abyssia and 3 out of 4 of my attacks were rebuffed by nothing but surprisingly high PD. The PD took much higher casualties and my guys had higher base morale, but the fighting was in hostile (to me) dominion and Arco gets a H2 priest in their PD, so my guys just got wore down and broke. Abysians don't run away very fast, my casualties were significant.

Now, this is a very specific example, and I've got no idea if my opponent used priests to push his dominion there, but the point of the story is that having friendly dominion on your border territories can be a very significant strategic asset in conjunction with H2 priests buffing your troops. Its very common to have enemy dominion creeping into your territories on the border, so it's very common that having a H2 priest will result in battles on your border being in friendly dominion when it otherwise wouldn't. Not to mention the scale benefit which can often be pushing upwards to a 50% increase in income for having friendly dominion vs just the negative aspects of your neighbors.