Dominion Vs Military

[Lex]

okay. I've been analysing this game for a while, yet I can't for the life of me see the amazin value of high dominion (except in race-specific strategies).

Here's the logic running through my head. I'm sure its flawed, but here it is anyways:

If you have the choice to build a temple or recruit more troops, why do veteran players "always" seem to chose the temple? You could buy another caster with 200 gold, which would provide a much wider range of advantages the a temple that very slowly increases your scales (which may not even be super impressive) in parts of your empire that probably won't produce any troops, and statistically aren't high income. It just seems alot more "reliable" to control/defend valuable provinces, and attack new ones when you need more resources/gold. Why bother with dominion?

If your opponent has negative scales, they'll only affect your border provinces, which are only a fraction of your total empire. Losing a bit of population somewhere is easily offset by using your gold to attack him (thus increasing your income even higher). Besides, fluctuating economies are a fact of life in times of war. Why commit so much to temples? And there's a good chance that your opponent will have good scales (only a handful of races use death3/cold3/heat3).

Lastly, having someone kill you by lowering ALL your dominion to 0 seems near impossible. I'm sure it happens, but it hardly justifies spending thousands on temples everywhere. In almost all cases it should be alot easier to wipe you out with military then kill your dominion.

So why does everyone give such high value to dominion? Even in the manual the hard advantages of dominion are minor, yet Dominion is made to sound like the most important part of the game (hence the title). Sure your troops get +1 moral and your Pretender is beefier, but you can't win the game with only your pretender...

I guess I'm saying, as a newbie, the impression I got from the manual and this forum is that Dominion is the key to this game, whereas so far I've only seen it usefull in a few race-specific strategies. I know I'm missing the real picture. Hopefully you can shed some light on this for me.

pushing dominion feels like the strategy in chess to control the centre of the board.. it's not seem obvious, but the pros say its a huge advantage. I dunno if i'm the only newbie who can't see beyond what's written in the manual, but I would love to hear the advantages of dominion discussed in general.

Anyways, its 4am and i'm still drunk.. i'm sure this will all make more sense in the morning.