[Saxon]

Jon,

The preaching does help. As I understand it, preaching gives you temple checks and blood sacrifices give you temple checks. It is just that you can usually get more temple checks, per gold spent, from sacrifices. Total how many checks you got from sacrifices each turn and how many preaching generated checks you had, then divide by one of those to get the percentages. Of course, that would be a bit anal! The point is that both methods do the same thing, just in different ways and at different costs. What did the job for you depends on which tool you used the most.

Now that you have it so low, you will quickly see it flip over your way and you can return to crushing the enemy in your favorite fashion!