Enemy dominion too high for me?

[Hrum]

I believe it's 1 temple check per slave sacrificed, but a given priest sacrifices a number of slaves equal to his holy level (+2 if he's wielding a jade knife). If you don't give the priest the number of slaves he wants (at a minimum, he's cool with holding on to extras), he will refuse to sacrifice any slaves (I don't think an H3 priest will sacrifice only 1 slave - it must be beneath him).

So an H3 with no knife sacrifices 3 blood slaves causing 3 temple checks in the province he's in, and the same H3 priest with a jade knife sacrifices 5 slaves causing 5 checks. Priests can only sacrifice in a temple, and only a single priest can sacrifice in a given temple, so if you go nuts with sacrificing you max out at an H3 priest with jade knife sacrificing in each province costing you 5 slaves * # of provinces in your empire per turn (for a 20 province empire that would be 100 slaves sacrificed a turn - you better be doing some major bloodhunting!).

All those added temples also increase your effective dominion from whatever the base dominion level was that you designed for your pretender. So in the example with 20 provinces, if you had a base dominion of 6 you now have an effective dominion (20 temples/5 = +4 to base dominion) of 10. Which makes those temple checks 100% likely (effective dom * 10% = chance of candle produced?) of producing +1 candle each not counting resistance from any dominion on your borders. Use an H3 w/ a jade knife to sacrifice from every province you own and your dominion will spread rapidly. Unless you just don't own enough territory; resolve that with military might or fail in your bid to rule the world.