My pretender died for no reason!

[Maltrease]

Wow. This can make a HUGE difference on larger games (especially single player).

I've often gone with a Dominion of 3 or 4 with the intention that once I build 20 or more temples I will overcome that weakness. But with this you are essentially permanently *screwed* if you start off with a very low dominion.

Does the starting dominion play any role on the "success" of your dominion knocking down a rival pretenders dominion? Or is that based on your current maximum?

[ceremony]

According to the developers, the dominion spread mechanism in Dom3 works as described in the manual: increasing your maximum dominion by building temples increases the chance of spread.

[Graeme Dice]

Awesome. Thanks for the information.

[curtadams]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works. Can Dominion pops get lost? I just ran a more extreme test and got a somewhat different result. I took no prophet and imprisoned pretender, as before, and played fake multiplayer so I didn't have to worry about the computer (duh...) This time the other player was far enough away to have no effect. I build 15 priests and then all at once built 15 extra temples, raising my maximum dominion to 4 (I checked on the recruitment screen). Anyway, I have 16 temples + home province = 17 checks. I forwarded through 6 turns. Expectations are:

No dominion improvement: 17*6*.1 = 10.2 pops
Dominion improvement: 17*6*0.4 = 40.8 pops

I actually got 18. This is way too few for the full improvement (p<.0001 cumulative that or below) but is a bit high for no improvement (p = .01 cumulative that or above). It's certainly not working the way I understand the manual, but what exactly is going on?

[Sheap]

I think the chances of a dominion increase happening are smaller the higher the current dominion is relative to the maximum. So, if some of your "pops" were spent raising dominion 3 to 4 in your inner provinces, some of them probably got lost.

[curtadams]

High dominion can cause checks to affect provinces other than the source, but according to the manual all the successful checks should produce a dominion increase. Dominion checks can get "lost" only if they happen in hostile dominion (absent in this test).

Each dominion spread in a province with friendly dominion will either increase that dominion level or make a new dominion spread in a random neighboring province instead.

[PhilD]

OK, I made my own little test. I started with dominion 1, imprisoned god, no prophet for the whole test.

On the turn before I built a temple, I had a total dominion of 5. On that turn, I built 19 temples, bringing my maximum dominion to 5 and my total temples to 20.

On the same turn, my total dominion jumped to 10 (+5 increase), with dom 2 in my capitol (this at least confirms that dominion spread is after temple building).

Next turn, total dom is 11 (+1), one temple was destroyed by a random event (maximum dominion down to 4)

Next turn, back to 20 temples, total dom is 16 (+5).

Next, down to 18 temples (two destroyed by events!), no increase.

On the 10th turn after I started building temples, my pretender awakened. On that turn, I had a total dom of 33, with 20 converted provinces. My capitol had 5 dom, a few others had more than 1.

At no point during the game did I see a red candle - large map, 2 players (the other was an AI; I should have done it with a second human player, so I could control the second player's dominion).

Now, if one takes into account the fact that the capitol is supposed to spread dominion like a temple, and that I had 2 turns with a maximum dom of 4 instead of 5 (plus the fact that on the last turn, my pretender gave me a guaranteed dominion spread, plus 2 temple checks), my cumulated dominion spread over these 10 turns was 996 - this, with the formula in the manual, should give an expected 99.6 dom increase, and seeing as it's supposed to be the sum of almost 100 independent Bernoulli trials, the total should be pretty close to Gaussian with a standard deviation of 5 - but I only got a total dom increase of 28, which is roughly 14 times the standard deviation below expectation. Statistically, it's a virtual impossibility. No statistician (I'm not one, though I could be described as a probabilist) would accept the hypothesis that dominion spread follows the rules as explained in the manual.

Now, another thing I noticed was that, during the whole test, my dominion was concentrated around my capitol. OK, so it had the equivalent of 2 temples, and should have spread dominion twice as fast as the other provinces, but still - during the whole run, the area covered by my dominion was connected, any provinces with higher than 1 dom were either adjacent or 2 clicks away (except maybe on the final turn), and the only provinces with temples that failed to gain at least 1 dominion were the farthest from home.

All of this supports the idea that capitol-based dom spread might follow the rules as described by the manual, but that the chances for successful temple checks from "real" temples remain based on initial dominion. With such a mechanism, 20 temples and a capitol would give me an expected dominion increase of 2.5 each turn (2 for 20 temples at 10% each, .5 for the home province), which is much, much more consistent with the observation. Or, it could remain based solely on initial dominion, even for the capitol, which would give only 2.1 per turn - in which case getting +28 over 10 turns, even with the pretender at the end, would be a bit high.

Now, I don't know if this will be considered sufficient evidence by IW, but I cannot believe that the dominion spread rules as described in the manual are what is implemented in the code.

[curtadams]

Time for a bug report?

[PhilD]

Done.