Newbie questions about prophets

[Raen]

1. Do people tend to make stealth prophets or prophets with higher priest skill?

2. Does the priest skill of the prophet have any effect on how quickly dominion will spread out from him?

3. What do you do with prophets other than hang out trying to spread dominion? I suppose he would be helpful to an attacking army....

[Truper]

I dunno what "people" do, but I know what I do

1. Depends somewhat on nation. My favorite for instance is Vanheim - and when playing them I make a Vanjarl my prophet so that I can have one commander with access to Fanaticism and Divine Blessing. Of course Vanjarls are stealthy, so in terms of your question I'm getting it both ways. But I don't use him as a stealth preacher, but to lead an army of Vans and Valkyries.

2. I don't believe his priest level has any effect on his dominion spreading, unless you are using him to preach. Then it does have an effect.

3. Yep, using his priestly powers to support you army is IMHO the way to go.

[geo981010]

I mainly agree with Truper!

1) If you only have level 3 holy commanders, you really want to empower one of them. If you only have holy 2 (like some themes of Ulm and Man), you should try and take a low encumberance troop as they will get Holy 3 (even if they have Holy 2).

If you have undead summoning troops with Unholy Power, you may want to make them the prophet to get the better undead summons.

If you have access to 4th level priests, getting level 5 is largely useless! Smite has a MR check and is of limited range, so isn't worth much. So either make a cheaper level 3 up to level 4 for early expansion, or use them on assasins/SCs/etc

(Edit: I initially goofed on this and thought Smite had no MR check and stunned, but I was very mistaken! Sorry )

A sneaky priest can be fun to get your dominion where it doesn't belong, but alert players will catch you. So I don't waste my prophet on that much, but maybe others do.

Or, a prophet gives you holy bonuses on a troop that usually don't get them. An Abysian Slayer can get all the bless bonuses (+attack and + armor are two great ones), and get +2 attack/defense and a big hit point bonus in your dominion. Great way to make a great fighter even better.

2) I agree with T about the dominion spreading. If you click on the temple button, you can see how much of an effect he is having.

3) I mostly don't have him spread dominion, but it could be useful if you are trying to stamp out someone else's dominion and get a kill, or you just want to mess with the temperature scales. For me, that is mainly secondary (or at least mid/late game planning) compared to the initial rush.

[ November 19, 2003, 00:14: Message edited by: geo981010 ]

[Taqwus]

I have a certain fondness for prophet-assassins early on, but then I play single-player and therefore can afford to do non-optimal goofy things just for the fun factor.
If I'm feeling truly weird, I might try to make an Iron Dragon prophet (Gift of Reason first) or something even stranger.

[licker]

Originally posted by Taqwus:
I have a certain fondness for prophet-assassins early on, but then I play single-player and therefore can afford to do non-optimal goofy things just for the fun factor.
If I'm feeling truly weird, I might try to make an Iron Dragon prophet (Gift of Reason first) or something even stranger.

Juggernaught (if that's the right one) prophit would be interesting, if its even possible. You know the construct that radiaties dominion already...

[HJ]

Originally posted by geo981010:
If you have access to 4th level priests, getting a 5th level is pretty handy since Smite is a very powerful spell. The damage is nice, no MR check anymore, and it paralyzes those it hits too.

Are you sure about this? The spell description doesn't say anything about the paralysis (and I haven't noticed it either), while at the same time it says that "magic resistance negates".