Dominion Vs Military

[Pickles]

Lex said:
why does it say you can't preach in a province because its reached maximum dominion, but then you look and there's only 2-3 dominion on that province, and your Pretender's dominion is like 8. what gives? do provinces have a maximum dominion different then your Pretender depending on circumstance?

Preaching depends on the level of the priest not the god
Temples give +1 level for this purpose & ceremonial faith 2 levels.

Pickles

[Nagot Gick Fel]

Arryn said:
...if a province's dominion "fills up", it will continue to spill over into successive provinces ad infinitum, in an expanding ripple,

There's no need for adjacent provinces to completely fill up for your dominion to expand further. In the aforementioned testbed after 100 turns, although my capital and the surrounding provinces had reached max dominion (10), it was only about 5-6 average 4 provinces away. Interestingly enough, the farthest province (11 away from the capital) showed a dominion of 2, while it connected to my 'dominion area' thru provinces where the dominion was only 1.

without the need for a "temple check" in that, or a directly-adjacent, province. This is the best way to explain dominion spread as Nagot is asserting.

FYI, I made a similar testbed with 2 nations, one (let's call it A) had a dominion of 10, the other (B) had a dominion of 8 + 9 extra temples (so 10 temples with one in the capital, ie an effective dominion of 10). I placed the capitals in opposite corners on a large map. Both dominions spreaded at a steady rate, with B spreading marginally faster. When the 2 dominions came into contact, B started to overrun A, and slowly pushed it back to its capital. At the time I stopped the experiment (after 100s of turns), B's dominion was about 10+ times as big as A's.

I have to say I ran this testbed in the early days of Dom:PPP, but from what I've seen I don't think the mechanics of dominion spread have changed, so I believe you could get similar results if you conduct the same experiment in Dom 2.

[Lex]

Vynd said:
A Priest can only raise dominion in a province up to his level in holy magic. So a basic indy priest can preach a province up to a positive 2 dominion, but no higher. This is what the message you're seeing refers to, not the max dominion that your nation is capable of. You pretty much have to rely on your Pretender, Prophet, and temples to truly max out your dominion in a province.

oh, yeah, that makes sense. so what do you do with all your L2 priests after they've maxed out your important provinces? do you ship them off to battle to cast courage nonstop, or do you keep them doing bugger-all until your pretender dies and you need to call god?

[Boron]

Lex said:

oh, yeah, that makes sense. so what do you do with all your L2 priests after they've maxed out your important provinces? do you ship them off to battle to cast courage nonstop, or do you keep them doing bugger-all until your pretender dies and you need to call god?

you can them always use against ermor / pan cw and other undead horde nations ( e.g. ctis desert tombs ).
or build new temples / castles etc in other provinces , shuffle troops ...

[Arryn]

Lex said:
so what do you do with all your L2 priests after they've maxed out your important provinces?

Give them Sceptres of Authority or Rods of the Phoenix and have them join your attack Groups as artillery.

[Cainehill]

Lex said:
oh, yeah, that makes sense. so what do you do with all your L2 priests after they've maxed out your important provinces? do you ship them off to battle to cast courage nonstop, or do you keep them doing bugger-all until your pretender dies and you need to call god?

Well, sadly, an L2 priest can't cast Sermon of Courage. Putting artillery items on them is an option, as Arryn pointed out, but the priests generally have crumby aim; only items with 100 accuracy or area of effect spells are particularly useful on them.

Personally, unless fighting an undead nation, I try to avoid building very many L2 priests; I don't find them particularly useful except for building temples and banishing undead, while they sap the gold income and clog the production queues. (So to speak - I'd generally rather build a scout, spy, or mage than a L2 priest.)

[Arryn]

Cainehill said:
Well, sadly, an L2 priest can't cast Sermon of Courage. Putting artillery items on them is an option, as Arryn pointed out, but the priests generally have crumby aim; only items with 100 accuracy or area of effect spells are particularly useful on them.

Incinerate, from the Rod of the Phoenix, never misses and generally kills (or at least seriously damages) what it hits.

Of course, if equipping your L2 priests is too much of a bother and you absolutely refuse to pay their measly 1.67gp/turn upkeep cost, you can always suicide them since they're commanders and can go off into hostile territory by themselves.

[The Panther]

Nagot Gick Fel said:
I made a similar testbed with 2 nations, one (let's call it A) had a dominion of 10, the other (B) had a dominion of 8 + 9 extra temples (so 10 temples with one in the capital, ie an effective dominion of 10). I placed the capitals in opposite corners on a large map. Both dominions spreaded at a steady rate, with B spreading marginally faster. When the 2 dominions came into contact, B started to overrun A, and slowly pushed it back to its capital. At the time I stopped the experiment (after 100s of turns), B's dominion was about 10+ times as big as A's.

This seems very easy to explain to me. Each temple is equal to your max dominion spread when pushing dominion. In this example, both nations had 30 for god and 10 for home province push. But A had only 10 for the single temple push while B had 10 temples at 10 each spread or 100, resulting in a whopping 90 additional dominion spread above B.

I think, in fact, that a 10 base dominion selection with 10 temples is exactly equal to an 8 base with 10 temples. The dominion spread should be identical, once B catches up to A by achieving 10 in the home province.

On a small map, high dominion is very important since you may not get the 19 extra provinces to increase your max dominion by 4 with mass templing. On a large map or with only a few players in the game, you might as well get low dominion and just plan on building lots of temples per the typical AI strategy.

My two cents worth anyway.

[Saxon]

One other point of note is that dominion spreads from the various points of dominion checking (temple, prophet, ect) and stops once it “finds” a place to effect. That is, it effects the provinces nearest the temple first, modified by a random choice of which nearby province to check. The general knock on expansion described in other Posts does work, but one can influence this. As such, one should also consider where your temples are built.

For example, a temple at the tail of your empire will spread dominion, but mostly in the tail of your empire. If you are fighting a two front war and on one front dominion is more important, the temple in the tail may or may not help you. On the other hand, a temple near the front lines of the important front will ensure that the effects are felt in the right place.

In addition, a high dominion is harder to overcome than a weak one. The idea of a “Wall of Dominion” to keep out enemy dominion does make sense and you can provide support to the “Wall”. If you build temples at the front, they will battle with the enemy dominion, hopefully defeating it or at least keeping it at bay. Ideally, your dominion will grow in strength, making it harder to defeat at the same time the temples keep pushing. This allows your back territory to expand undisturbed. If you instead chose to keep all your dominion generation in the center of the empire, counting on it to spread out, you will have very weak dominion at the edges (see other Posts) and the effects of your dominion will be spread evenly along the edges of your empire. This weak dominion will soon be defeated and you are splitting your defensive resources in trying to stop it.

In short, do not throw out Ceremony’s model. It has one error, but the guiding principles of that very well written article are still valid. It is also worth repeating what has been noted before, the article was written with developer input, so it has more insight than many of our general speculations.