A few questions
 

1. What is the most effective way to stop a dominion-loss once you are already far into the game? My ally/friendly neighbor is playing ermor, and his passive dominion is on the verge of killing me. He agreed not to build temples on my boarder or preach, but I am still going to be dominion-snuffed. I have temples and priests preaching in almost all my provinces, but even my capital is losing the battle! (I am Utgard)

2. For some odd reason or sequence of occurences, my bloodslaves became garrisoned units instead of 'gems'. Can they still be expended in battle as normal slaves? If so, how can I make this happen again? it seems like a good way of keeping the slaves away from my abysian heat aura.

3. What does the spell 'illwinter' do? its not in the manuel afaik and the spell description is vague. Its a national global for the jotuns, but what it does is unclear.

4. All my warlocks got old age at the same time, all at once. Is this a bug, bad luck, or just what I get for taking death scale 1?

5. Whats a heliophagus, and is it worth it? Better SC than an Archdevil?

Re: A few questions
 

1) You need a roughly equally strong dominion and lots of temples plus preaching to stop and reverse that trend and it'll be hard.

2) You can try. AFAK, it has not been tested, but I think they can' be used.

3) It sneds the whole world to cold scale 3, reduces income and generally wreaks havoc.

4) Every 12 game turns is one year. When a unit reaches its old age value, it gets the old age icon. So all warlocks recruited during one year will turn old on the same year regardless of the turn they were recruited on. Death scale increases your chances of getting afflictions due to old age (checked at the end of the year, i.e Late Winter).

5) It's a more powerful version of arch devil but has blood magic instead of fire magic. They each have unique specialties. Yes, it's worth it, in my opinion anyway.

Re: A few questions
 

Build lots and lots of temples and preach. There is no other way. Maybe you picked a very low Dominion for your pretender.

Maybe they fled the battlefield and got added to the units by that. Wonder if they are still useable for magic.

http://www.shrapnelgames.com/Illwinter/Dom3/6.htm

Old age purely depends on the unit. Klick on its Fatigue. As soon as it hits the value in the brackets, it is old age. I dunno if all units have the same birthday and thus all gain a year once it is the end of winter, but that might be.

It's, like, in the manual? Page 167. Here's a screenshot, mine has differing magic skills because there seem to be four unique versions of them.
http://i13.tinypic.com/2uqhgmp.jpg

Re: A few questions
 

Basically Dominion pushes Dominion.
You can push harder. Build more temples and priests, make a prophet and move it around, maybe move your god forward also but not too much.

You can demolition his dominion. Concentrate on taking out his temples and priests, some units have special abilities against enemy dominion, some equipment is especially powerful against enemy dominion, make extra effort to take out his prophet and god.

Bloodslaves in the queue are basically broken as far as I know. It can also happen with mercenaries under certain coniditions where they leave their troops behind. They will appear with the PD if the province is attacked but I dont remember if they fight or flee.

Re: A few questions
 

Sorry, I meant to say they all got diseased on the same turn (about 9 of them). They all started with old age.

As for illwinter, does anyone know how strong the random attacks are? Can they handle low/medium PD?

Re: A few questions
 

You got unlucky. One of the most common afflictions from old age is disease, and Death scale increases chance of occurrence, so if the turn was late winter and they got it on next hosting, that's what happened.

Re: A few questions
 

Did they all get diseased in the same province? Some lab that is not at your capital? If you have less than 4 magic sites found in the province then I would do some searching for a hidden death site, and I think maybe blood also. There are some that can cause disease even if hidden.

Re: A few questions
 

Edi, your point about all units recruited in the same year getting old at the same time is a bit off. There's a small random element to a unit's age at recruitment..most units are so far away from the old age break point on either end that it doesn't matter, but it does for some units (Master smiths as one example)

All units do have the same birthday though, as you said.

Re: A few questions
 

I know about the randomness in age issues, Micah, but I was simplifying. Besides, these are Abysian mages we're talking about, almost all of them start old so it was just a matter of the lot of them getting hit by the end of the year affliction check.

Re: A few questions
 

If you are in serious danger of being dominion-killed, then put your pretender AND prophet together into a province with a temple. Unless your dominion is horrifically weak, that should give you one province with unbeatable dominion.

Clustering your temples together might help also. Not entirely sure how the temple conversion checks work.