My pretender died for no reason!

[Graeme Dice]

ceremony said:
I believe it was the same in Dom2 - when I wrote this part of the manual, I used the old Dom2 dominion .pdf I wrote as a model, and this part was unchanged. In any case, I am just correcting a point of confusion with the rules - I am not criticizing.

You should ask Illwinter if they changed it then, since they made a post at one point in the Dom2 forum that your chance of a successful temple check did not depend on your current maximum dominion, but instead on the maximum dominion at pretender creation.

[ceremony]

That's interesting. In the dominion chapter I wrote for Dom2, the chance of temple check being successful was based on maximum dominion, and that was directly from Illwinter. So perhaps it was changed later.

[Cainehill]

And either way, if you take a starting dominion of 2 or 3, each temple check has only a 20/30 percent chance until you build five temples, at which point you _still_ have either a slightly improved low chance of success, or the same dismal chance of success.

[Meglobob]

ceremony said:
That's interesting. In the dominion chapter I wrote for Dom2, the chance of temple check being successful was based on maximum dominion, and that was directly from Illwinter. So perhaps it was changed later.

I play alot of games with dominion 9 or 10 and my dominion spreads like wildfire, so I would say every temple check I have is at 90% with 9 or 100% with 10. It overpowers indies with ease, slows down of course when it hits another players dominion (because u then have a largely invisible to most players dominion battle going on), enemy dominion vs yr dominion then uses a different formula to work out.

I believe the dom3 manual to be spot on in exactly how dominion works/spreads.

[ceremony]

Meglobob said:
I believe the dom3 manual to be spot on in exactly how dominion works/spreads.

The manual is definitely right for Dom3. When I referred to "being changed later" I was only talking about Dom2, and then only for part of Dom2, since at one point the mechanics were the same as Dom3. I never recall dominion working differently in either game, so I'm just taking Graeme's word for it that IW posted differently at one point for Dom2.

[Graeme Dice]

Meglobob said:
I play alot of games with dominion 9 or 10 and my dominion spreads like wildfire, so I would say every temple check I have is at 90% with 9 or 100% with 10.

That's not what the question is about. The question is about the behaviour of temples compared to the starting dominion strength. In dominions II, if you took a starting dominion strength of 1, then your temples never had more than a 10% chance to spread dominion, regardless of how many temples you had built. My question was whether the devs changed this for Dom3, or if they left it the same as in Dom2.

I found the thread where they mentioned this. It's at
Dominion Spreading Effects

[Arralen]

.. and it's the same way in Dom3:

Initial dominion strength govern how easy your dominion spreads: how often you get successfull "temple checks" which results in "dominion plopps" which travel around to settle down in some province which has less then max dominion.
Thats what you pay design points for!

Number of temples only governs the max number sacreds you can recruit, and up to which strength you can boost your local dom strength by preaching (which only raises it in the prov. the priest is in).

I have seen dom strength go higher then the "rated" strength from starting dom and temple numbers, therefore the max strength seems not to be capped directly any more.

[PhilD]

Arralen said:
.. and it's the same way in Dom3:

Initial dominion strength govern how easy your dominion spreads: how often you get successfull "temple checks" which results in "dominion plopps" which travel around to settle down in some province which has less then max dominion.
Thats what you pay design points for!

This is not how Bruce understood it when he wrote the manual; his understanding (and mine, but then, my sources are what he wrote) is that building temples increases the chances of temple checks being successful.

Number of temples only governs the max number sacreds you can recruit, and up to which strength you can boost your local dom strength by preaching (which only raises it in the prov. the priest is in).

Here, at least, the part about how high preaching can take dominion is wrong. Number of temples (and starting dom) governs how high your dominion can go in any province,
no matter how. The limit for preaching is twice the preacher's Holy level (+1 if there is a local temple).

I have seen dom strength go higher then the "rated" strength from starting dom and temple numbers, therefore the max strength seems not to be capped directly any more.

This is not what the discussion is about; the question is whether the chance of each "temple check" being successful only depends on starting dominion, or on starting dominion and number of temples. The manual says it's starting dom and number of temples, and the in-game info you get when clicking on a temple seems to support this.

[Graeme Dice]

PhilD said:
The manual says it's starting dom and number of temples, and the in-game info you get when clicking on a temple seems to support this.

The in-game info in Dom2 also indicated this, which is the problem here. My issue is that Illwinter provided Bruce with the information on dominion spread for Dom2, information that they later realized was incorrect. Bruce at first indicated that he had used this information in writing the Dom3 manual, which leads to the question of whether the dominion spreading mechanism matches the manual, or matches Dom2.