Can normal army take out Sphinx pretender?

[Endoperez]

The dominion value you start with affects the speed your dominions spreads with. 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 you took low dominion, your dominion won't go above your borders, but with lots of temples you can have your whole empire under positive dominion.

[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.

[sushiboat]

Alneyan said:
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.

From my memory of Illwinter's description on this forum, your nation will get a certain number of dominion-increasing "plops." A plop has a probability of increasing your dominion in a province or decreasing enemy dominion. If it does not succeed in its own dominion, it moves on to another province. Only failure in enemy dominion kills a plop. Therefore, having your own dominion 10 in provinces doesn't hurt. The plop just moves on to somewhere it has a chance of doing good.

[Alneyan]

Sometimes, I really hate English. When I wrote "to push your Dominion", I was speaking from the enemy's perspective, not your own perspective. I use "push" when attacking an enemy Dominion, and "spread" when putting your own Dominion somewhere, but it's not as if there was any authoritative Dominions dictionary.

[Oversway]

Preaching the sphinx out seems like a good strategy.

If you want to fight, maybe consider fatigue inducing spells/attacks. That will help you get around the high protection, especially since the sphinx has to use fatigue to attack.

[Gargoyle]

I tried earlier to storm the Sphinx castle and "forgadabowdit". Eomer, Man and Ulm are the other powerful empires out there and are keeping my armies too occupied to bother with this "insignificant fool" (insert evil laughter).

He's bottled up in his fort. I think I will keep him there. I'm going to move my Pretender and Prophet (when I can have another since he died, lol) to the area and hope to drive down his dominion. I'd love to see him just fade away.

[sushiboat]

Alneyan, my point is still different from what you are saying, I think. If a plop is in friendly dominion +4, it might settle there to increase dominion to +5, as opposed to moving on, possibly to attack enemy dominion. If a plop is in friendly dominion +10, it will definitely move on, since it can do no more good there. Thus, having high friendly dominion and attacking enemy dominion are related. When friendly dominion is maxed out, then enemy dominion is more likely to be attacked.

Then again, I could be wrong.