My pretender died for no reason!

[Shovah32]

Place alot of temples, sure they cost 400 gold and are easily destroyed but they give a great boost (and every 5 increases your max dominion by 1). As for preaching, i put the majority of my priests on my borders to hold enemy dominion at bay but i still spread some around my empire so dominion dosnt go down there either.

And yes, priests can affect neighbouring provinces (or else only stealth priests could remove enemy dominion)

[ceremony]

Shovah32 said:
And yes, priests can affect neighbouring provinces

Actually, they do not. Priest preaching only affects the province that they are in.

[Cainehill]

Also, make sure you don't take too low a starting dominion on your pretender. Until you have enough experience to consider subtleties like horrible scales and stealth dominion, you really shouldn't go any lower than 4 for starting dominion, and 5 or 6 is really a much better minimum. This is because higher dominion is harder to push out, and also because of the way temple checks work : with a starting dominion of 2, your temples will _never_ have more than a 20% chance of increasing/spreading dominion, regardless of your maximum dominion from building temples. With starting dominion 6, each has a 60% chance.

[ceremony]

Cainehill said:
because of the way temple checks work : with a starting dominion of 2, your temples will _never_ have more than a 20% chance of increasing/spreading dominion, regardless of your maximum dominion from building temples.

That actually isn't quite how it works: temple checks are based on maximum dominion, so building additional temples will increase your dominion spread chance.

[Agrajag]

ceremony said:

That actually isn't quite how it works: temple checks are based on maximum dominion, so building additional temples will increase your dominion spread chance.

Which IIRC is unlike dom2, which is probably why Cainehill got confused

[ceremony]

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.

[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.