Building temples (noob question)

[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.

[Tyrant]

A temple does raise dominion better than a couple of level 2 priests. Among other things the max dominion by preaching is 2X priest level. Temples do spread to other provences before they max the one they are in. The closer they get to max dominion level, the more likely the temple check is to travel.

On the other hand, building a temple without a castle in MP is pretty much a waste of cash unless you are at peace. It *will* be burned unless it is in a protected spot.

[Hullu]

What annoys me is that the 'research hub' is better off in the plains instead of in a castle. Since zero of your researchers can fight with your pd, ever, unless you know an attack is coming the very turn it comes.

For that reason it's good to have a lab in a province that isn't a castle and have high pd and all your mages there researching....

[mivayan]

Hullu said:
What annoys me is that the 'research hub' is better off in the plains instead of in a castle. Since zero of your researchers can fight with your pd, ever, unless you know an attack is coming the very turn it comes.

For that reason it's good to have a lab in a province that isn't a castle and have high pd and all your mages there researching....

Just be carefull against humans. 2-3 mages flying in with boots of flying on a suicide mission to cast earthquake x2, will kill a lot of unprotected human mages.

[HoneyBadger]

thanks everyone, I'm glad to see that this wasn't just a random handicap and that castles can be used for defense, rather than being obstacles to defense.

[Cainehill]

Oh - given that usually most of your researchers are fairly useless in combat ( almost any mage with no more than 1 level of magic ) you don't _want_ them getting into it. On the other paw, if you're getting indie mages with 2 or more in a path (main one I can think of in Dom3 being crystral mages and a fire mage school) you might want them out in the open doing double duty as research/defense.

But generally? Use a fort to keep them mages alive. Not many players take the time to script _every_ researching mages for combat - but when someone attacks your fort, you dang sure do.