Building temples (noob question)

[Endoperez]

Losing your laboratory is a bit tougher, especially if your pretender doesn't have any magic. In that case, try to recruit a suitable mercenary group.

[Meglobob]

I have noticed in most my MP games that lots of players build temples, loads of them, in provinces without a castle.

Is this really a good idea?

I personally only build a temple/laboratory where I have a castle or in a province which gives me a special unit type (and then I protect it with at least PD 30, if its not worth building a castle), in order to keep my dominion up I just recruit priests. A temple costs 400 gold a go, while a priest costs 50 gold or less for some nations. 2-3 priests can do the job of 1 temple, I find and have the advantage of being movable. I am thus saving 250 gold and getting more benefit, so I think my strategy is better.

What do other players think? Is my strategy flawed? Am I missing something?

[Strages Sanctus]

priests preaching raise dominion in that province only. Preaching with a temple present makes them preach one level higher.

Temples generate 'temple checks' for the pretender and by themselves and are involved in spread checks. So pretty sure they are very good and adding to the overall effect of your dominion spreading, not just at the local level.

[Meglobob]

Strages Sanctus said:
priests preaching raise dominion in that province only. Preaching with a temple present makes them preach one level higher.

Temples generate 'temple checks' for the pretender and by themselves and are involved in spread checks. So pretty sure they are very good and adding to the overall effect of your dominion spreading, not just at the local level.

I know all this, but those temple checks just create big blobs of dominion at the locations where you have the temples. To spread further, seems to take for ever especially to the outer reachs of your empire, which is usually where you want high dominion. Also temple checks only raise dominion in there province until you reach your dominion maxium. Only then do you get a temple check for a adjacint province.

A squad of 3 priests even lvl 1 can very quickly raise dominion to 2 in all your outer bordering provinces, thus protecting you from enemy dominion. Thery cost 150gp, and can move around, a temple costs 400gp and is fixed in place. Mobile units are often better then immobile buildings.

[HoneyBadger]

I'll hijack this thread too.

Speaking of protecting your temples with castles, why is it that you can add units to your PD on lands where you don't have a castle, but when you do have a castle, you're stuck with all bought units behind the castle walls in the initial attack. I could have a PD of 20 successfully guarding a castle, if I could buy specific support units, but instead, it's PD alone vs the enemy and then units alone for the seige. It actually means that castled provinces are LESS well-defended than ones without!
it just takes the enemy longer to annhilate a far more expensive-but far weaker-province.

Am I missing something? I hope so

[Strages Sanctus]

you can set commanders to patrol province and they will defend with the PD in the initial pre siege attack.

[Endoperez]

Patrol. Also, Move & Patrol.

[Kydorias]

Yeah, any commanders patrolling in a castle province will fight (with their army) alongside the PD.

Also, I never knew there was a "Move & Patrol" command in D2 and I didn't discover it in D3 until about two weeks ago! And that was by accident.

Anyway, "Move & Patrol" works like this. Say you are in one of your provinces next to another of your provinces with a castle. On the other side of your castle province is a large enemy force about to move into the province with your castle. If you just "Move" into your castle province, you'll actually move your forces into the castle and the enemy will attack only your PD next turn. So if you want to defend with your army alongside the PD, give orders to "Move" into the province with the castle, then reselect your commander. Now he'll have the "Move & Patrol" command available. Select that and he'll move with his army into the castle province in a patrolling mode and when the enemy attacks they'll be facing both your commander, his army, and the PD.

By the way, "Move & Patrol" only works when moving a force into one of your castle provinces. Unfortunately you can't use it to move into one of your provinces with no castle and try and catch an enemy scout before they evac.

[Saxon]

Winning by straight dominion takes a long time and when I was fiddling with it in a game yesterday (I had the day off) it seemed that I would have won the game faster by spending the money on troops. Of course, dominating the dominion situation helped by troops a lot, but having a temple in every province was overkill. However, I was surprised at how long it took, given the money I had sunk into it.

In other words, pushing dominion is tough and slow. I agree with the poster who said that money spent on temples is money not spent on troops and you can go too far down the temple road. Striking the balance is the tough part.

I also tried the mobile squad of priests. It did help quite a bit in beating down the enemy dominion. In particular, they help take down “dominion walls” in newly conquered areas. However, it was the temples which then push into enemy territory. You need both if you want to ever fight in your own dominion on the offensive. Otherwise the priests just clean up nasty dominion effects in your territory.

[Ironhawk]

Meglobob said:
I have noticed in most my MP games that lots of players build temples, loads of them, in provinces without a castle.

Is this really a good idea?

It is if you are doing something special with your dominion. Like if you have Gift of Health, which boost all your units health proportional to the amount of your dominion in that province. Or if you are trying to Dominion-kill someone. Or trying to spread your negative dominion into an enemies lands to weaken him w/o explicitly going to war.