Dominion Spread

[Micah]

Hellboy,

The manual is wrong. It may be a bug, it may be a change, but temple spread is unaffected by dominion increases from having extra temples.

There is no scale for increasing your gem income, or it would obviously be a more important factor than growth. Gold isn't that important late game, but building temples, castles, labs, and mages is always useful. Troops are also still used for the purpose of beating down gates, so being able to buy more troops speeds sieges along, meaning you get the gem income of a province that much more quickly.

What would you say is a more significant long-term consideration than the gold boost from growth? Some possibilities would be the luck scale, E/N blesses, or a pretender that covers the holes of your national paths. Luck is a maybe, but most of the good events give gold, or an insignificant amount of gems. The blesses are nation-specific depending on what's sacred, so tht's a tricky one. I'd support saying that a pretender that covers holes in your magic paths might be the most important consideration for late-game, although depending on what indies you find it might not be a concern.

Mostly though, as I said, it's going to come down to how large your resource pool is, which is based on early and mid game success. A 5-gem income advantage (that's about 2 provinces on a high-magic map) on turn 10 adds up to 200 gems on turn 50...if you haven't found any indies by then you can easily burn some of those on empowering if need be and still come out ahead.

And no, the best expander on turn 20 isn't always going to win, but they have the best POTENTIAL to win, all else being equal.