dominion spread

[Coldshard]

Ok, so I've read over the dominion spread info in the manual but in a test game I just ran something odd happened..

I was testing out killing off a foe using dominion spread. Side A had side B reduced to two keep provinces only, and they were several spaces apart. The one without an opposing pretender I parked my prophet, a temple, and my pretender god next to (far side relative to the direction of the line connecting side b's provinces). No preaching was performed by either side.

The dominion scale for each side started at 7, and side A had 7 temples total while side B had 1 temple in the same province as their pretender.

After a couple of rounds the scales sat with the side A province at 8 while side B's fortress was at -6.

After about 4 rounds of no change I decided to start constructing Juggernaughts in order to test how they sped up the dominion spread.

At 1 Juggernaught a round it took until side A had 20 Juggernaughts before the side B's keep dominion dropped to -5. Side A was up to 35 Juggernaughts before side B's keep became +3.

I noticed that most of the world had become +3 at this point. Sea provinces, distant lands, and everything except for side B's pretender keep (which was at -1) was at a positive value.

I realize that dominion spread is random, but this seems a little crazy! An enemy keep surrounded by friendly dominion with many checks a round against a foe with a stronger effective dominion scale that was not trying to defend its own dominion in any way... and it only lost its dominion a few rounds before the pretenders keep gave out which was a pretty long ways away!

So do keeps generate extra dominion or resist changing to opposing dominion? Why were provinces that did not have active preaching seemingly maxing out at 3 dominion?

[MaxWilson]

Raising dominion locally is easier than extinguishing it locally--dominions prefers to spread rather than deepen/attack. I haven't done a lot with dominion killing, but I suspect you'd have gotten it more quickly by building lots of temples (way more than 7) back in A's homeland.

Paradoxically, it would also help if A and B were both surrounded by a hostile (high) dominion C, so that A's successful temple checks didn't spread so far and had a better chance of landing on B.

Keeps do not generate extra dominion, but homelands (capitals) do generate one (special) temple check each round. That, plus his temple, is probably what helped B push back A's dominion.

(The specialness of the temple check is that it's one of the few temple checks that actually works as advertised in the manual, i.e. increases by 1 for every 5 temples built. Pretender and prophet checks work this way too IIRC, but most other temples just check against your starting Dominion.)

-Max

[Micah]

Max, where did you get the intel about prophets/home prov/pretenders getting the extra spread from temples? Just the first time I'd heard it confirmed.

[MaxWilson]

Micah,

It's not firsthand--I've never tested dominion spread--and since I can't find a link to my source you should probably disregard it. Sorry.

If I were to test it, I would probably make a special map with some provinces that have no neighbors, then teleport a prophet/pretender in there and observe for a few turns. If you start with a dominion of 1 and build 50 temples it should be pretty easy to observe which dominion score is in effect. Harder to do that with your homeland, but doable if you disconnect it from any neighbors and make Arco zero out your home province dominion with (empowered, teleporting) skeptics.

-Max

[Endoperez]

Dom2 thread in which Kristoffer says something similar to Max's first comment:
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...&Number=329384

Dom3 thread in which Twan's test seemed to support the above, even though Kristoffer said that the manual should be right.
http://www.shrapnelcommunity.com/thr...&Number=480318

[Coldshard]

I appreciate the help everyone

MaxWilson said:
Keeps do not generate extra dominion, but homelands (capitals) do generate one (special) temple check each round. That, plus his temple, is probably what helped B push back A's dominion.

Just to make sure I am being clear, difficult without a diagram, the keep that I was sitting next to with my pile of guys did not have a temple, was it their main keep, did not have the opposing pretender in it, nor did it have anyone preaching.

Basically a side B dominion undefended province surrounded by side A dominion and a whole lot of guys who should spread dominion like crazy took a suicidally long time to overcome, from the point of view of a normal game amount of time.



I will check out the links more thoroughly shortly, I just found the exercise to be a little disheartening in that it took longer than sieging the keep normally.. and sieging a keep takes way too long in a normal game without splurging on specialized gear for the attempt.

[MaxWilson]

Yeah, if a capital has a temple it generates two checks per round. Even without a temple it generates one. You had a temple, a pretender, and a prophet parked next door, which adds up to something like three and a half temple checks.

-Max

[Agrajag]

I'm pretty sure dominion spread spreads in a random direction, so if you park temples and prophets and whatnot in a province next to an enemy castle, there's only a small chance the spread will even go to that castle (because your province also has many other neighbours to spread the dominion to).
Maybe if you surrounded their castle with temples in all surrounding provinces...

[Micah]

It mostly just boils down to dom-kill not being a very good way to take out an opposing nation in most cases. The couple of times I've actually managed to use it as a good tactic were one time with preaching (Against Mictlan, meaning he had incredibly low dom-spread and no ability to preach or spread dominion without a temple) and a massive blood-sacrifice campaign with LA Marignon and their H3 priests against a newish player that didn't notice what I was up to, but was playing LE Ermor and just had too many troops to deal with.

[Coldshard]

MaxWilson said:
Yeah, if a capital has a temple it generates two checks per round. Even without a temple it generates one. You had a temple, a pretender, and a prophet parked next door, which adds up to something like three and a half temple checks.

-Max

The juggernaut spell claims that they each spread dominion like a prophet...

I'm not sure when the dominion checks are made (as in before or after summoning) but I was looking at something like this:

Round 1: 1 automatic, 4 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 2: 1 automatic, 5 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 3: 1 automatic, 6 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 4: 1 automatic, 7 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 5: 1 automatic, 8 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 6: 1 automatic, 9 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 7: 1 automatic, 10 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 8: 1 automatic, 11 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 9: 1 automatic, 12 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B
Round 10: 1 automatic, 13 temple checks for side A, 0 checks for side B

and so on until round 20 when side B's dominion in the province finally dropped by 1 point.

This seems.. unreasonable.. to me.