[Kheldron]

3/Strategy :

I view this dominion war as something quite manichean, what with all these black and white candles, quite the same as the old fire/water opposition. Let’s say for the sake of my explanation that you’re in the water side. Look at these black candles as if they were burning trees. This is a wildfire and as a fireman you shall do your best to extinguish it.
Now how are you going to use these tools?

- Preachers & Stealth Preachers: They’re your firemen. Used to consolidate at home or to go deep inside the fire if stealthy. They sadly are as efficient as firemen without fire hoses. They can do some nice things against a small fire (ie. low dominion, few candles) but don’t expect much of them against a raging wildfire (a province at fulldom is nearly immune to them)

- Blood sacrifice: Ah, there you’ve got fire hoses, albeit they seem to be used in a smoke cloud. It targets as precisely as a mole in the fog and you’ll often rage at the direction in which you dominion spread but no other tool yields so much results. Jade knife is a high-technology fire-fighting foam to enhance your efficiency. Mandatory.

- Flying pretender/prophet and Melancholia: Your Air Tankers snuffing candles from afar.

Again, it’s all a matter of critical mass. Ever seen the efficiency of a single fire hose against a rampaging wildfire? Moot. No, you need to drown it. Literally. Hundreds of hectolitres it is if you want to reach any result. There really is a threshold before which you rage at the poor results of this tactic and beyond which the results are shockingly good. The difference between a candle with or without a flame.
In short, be heavy-handed whenever you try to snuff those candles. And don’t worry that any leftover would be lost, it’ll just spread to nearby candles.

In my skaven guide I advised to teleport a grey seer (S3H3 stealthy preachers) wielding a jade knife behind the lines to blood sacrifice in the heart of your enemy dominion. Later, I ran across a Marverni guide from Baalz that advised to do the same with several druids teleporting with jade knives. You’d think we had the same idea? Wrong.
I was wrong and he was right. The key word here is several.
I tried my tp tactic in MP. I had a H3 preacher wielding a jade knife, sacrificing for a grand total of 11 temple checks and all I had for my pain was a fit at the results. Though my enemy barely had 4-5 temples at most in the neighbourhood. You need to reach the critical mass.
I tried it with just one more H3+JK sacrificer and all of a sudden, like a barrage giving way to a lake after a heavy rain, it suddenly spread with high velocity.

This rule applies to everything you use to dompush. Whether it is stealthy preachers or sacrificers, use them in clusters.
That’s also why blood sacrifice is so much more efficient than preaching: it’s a lot easier to get 50 temple checks spreading outward from a few provinces than to get 50 H3 stealthy preachers inside your enemy’s kingdom. Even then, I’m not sure they would be as efficient. Add to that the cost of 50 H3 preachers in comparison to 5 H3+JK sacrificers.
Sure you can target provinces with stealthy preachers but still…

Finally, I’ve noticed that all my domkilling games were shortlived ones, as everything was decided by the end of year 4. When the domwave start rolling over the landscape like a tidal wave, there are just so many nations threatened by it that the game’s soon decided between the few survivors of the Deluge. It’s a matter of you domkilling everyone before they gang and kill you…or not.


Year 1:

During the early game, don’t dream of domkilling anyone unless you start next to a low dominion with a flying dom10 pretender and/or prophet ready. Your pretender is a dompush cluster all by himself with 3 guaranteed temple checks at dom10. Only it can allow you to score a domkill before year 2, as it’s hard to blood sac and get more than a handful of stealthy preachers in year 1 (which would also be crippling to your early research). The best way to leverage its cost is to take an awake SC (awe+2) with a high base dom like a Prince of Death or a Virtue.

Catch your opponent unaware and avoid the usual strategic places like forts or chokepoints that are so obvious you risk to run in his main army. Try instead to target the dominion pockets to drown his candles, a thing your pretender is most efficient at. At this stage of the game, your opponent should only have a few candles to snuff so even a handful of stealthy preachers can make a difference, especially if you prophetized your scout.
Having your god jumping around like a mad scarecrow can be quite disturbing for your opponent and even if he sees the domthreat he must still run after it, lest he loses all his precious territory.
You’ll find examples of that in the Corydalis and InversionsRedux MP games I attached at the end of this post.


Year 2-3:

Year 2-3 domwar is the most tricky and entertaining part. You should now have access to a burgeoning blood economy and hopefully reached construction 4 for a few jade knives.
Unless you were particularly efficient, you’ll have to wait for late year 3 to get a massive dompush from them. For now, you have to maximize your dominion inside your territory and start building facilities (ie. temples + forts if possible) on the border of your next domtarget.
The only research you need so far is construction 4, the rest should be mostly oriented towards battlemagic and globals to survive becoming public enemy n°1 soon after.
The reason for it is that unless you play with the graphs off, people will start being nervous/wary of your sudden dominion rise, even if you’re still not pushing toward them. Let’s say the truth, there will be some of it spreading toward them whether you want it or not. It even is a good thing as it will let you appraise your neighbors domstrength before the onslaught.

Always prey on the weakest, unless of course their territory stretches away from you, the best target being one clustered close to your temples with a low dominion.
Once you’ve decided which neighbour should be your prey you only need 3-4 turns ahead to plan your dompush. Send your stealthy preachers in advance if you’ve got some, craft JKs to equip each of your border sacrificers, prepare your pretender for war and make sure you have secured your bloodhunting facilities (patrols+forts if possible) for when retaliation comes.
On the turn you decide to dompush you should start to blood sac nearly everywhere on your territory. The JKs should be used on the border but even remote sacrifices will help. Even a tiny stream at the other end of the lake will help it spill over the barrage.

You need critical mass.

If you can’t have at least 5 times as many temple checks as your opponent in a 2 lands radius of your border, I advise you not to go for it. Wait and craft some more JKs and build more temples to sacrifice until you have the means of a short and efficient war.
Once the war has begun, your targets are the same as firemen. You need to get inside the building and look for the source to quench it.
Blood sacrifice is here to quench the fire on a large scale, your pretender and preachers should go for the sources: temples!
Burn them down…err, drown them. That is the second most important part after critical mass as once your candles replace his on these sources, all the rest shall dwindle on its own due to the overall pressure of your bloodsac. Remember that as long as he’s got friendly dominion on a province, it can spread to nearby provinces even if he’s got but a single candle on the source. Most annoying.
If you want your stealthy preachers to show any efficiency, cluster them on the temples. They’re definitely of no use alone. Meanwhile, your pretender should be flying to the hard-to-reach dominion pockets, remote temples and random domspread rekindling fire here and there. If you can teleport or fly several preachers behind the line to blood sac, do it.

I would not have you think this is as simple as it sounds; be aware that dominion contest has a non negligible random factor as most things in this game. When your opponent recognises the threat he should turn all his priests to preaching, which may be a good thing towards crippling his research and battlemagic if they happen to also be his mages. They should mostly be clustered in forts hence my advice to also cluster your stealthy preachers there to counter them, hopefully with unrest rituals to cover them.
I’ve read several times that preaching apparently applied before temple checks and was thus a poor counter to them. I don’t know for sure but what is sure is their poor efficiency…except at this part of the game when your blood sac capabilities are still burgeoning.

In all my games, year 2 dominion wars were the trickiest because each and every time I had my opponent seemingly dying every turn and still surviving with barely 1-2 candles rekindling here and there, supposedly preaching like hell to survive while my pretender air tanker flew to quench the last candles, my stealthy preachers clustered under his forts and sacrificers increasing their blood-crazy pace in the background. Until his final demise.

Meanwhile, you should now be facing heavy opposition from your other neighbours, either from the pleas of your target advocating to kill you before you’re out of control (he’s right), or simply because your dompush unwittingly spread and threatened them.

Diplomacy is the key here.

If you have secured all the NAPs you can by the time you start your domwar, this will be that many turns spared to you. If you can trick or motivate a remote player to attack one of your neighbours, the better. Remember, your war should be short (high max 8-10 turns) as you don’t need to besiege his forts to win, only to snuff his candles.
The counterpart is that once you have started your war on someone, whether you want it or not it’ll most likely end up with a war on everyone. Once your dompush will have domkilled him, you’ll have started threatening all your other neighbours with your dominion unless they also blood sacced.
This is why dompush should only ever be a side strategy. You should always have planned to be a power in your own right with the usual warfare tools. Battlemagics, thugs and troops should be ready. Not to invade your opponent (your dominion can do that), but to repel them -and also your initial target, you didn’t think he’d stand gaping while you domkilled him, did you?

The good point is that it only requires construction 4 to pull out your dompush which is usually part of any strat anyway. Beware that as a blood nation, you’ll have to rely on other stuff than blood, or at least diversify your means, as most of your slaves will end up on the altar. Refer to guides on your specific nation to survive.

To sum it up :
- Critical mass
- Go for the sources
- Diplomacy


Year 4-5:

If you survived this far in a medium-sized map, the victory should be at hand since your bloodsaccing capabilities are now at their highest, JKs all around and ultimately more temple checks generated each turn than the total number of provinces in the map. This is the threshold beyond which you’ll know you’ve won, when your dompush will start looking like a tidal wave, quenching even the hottest furnace.
Truth be told, bloodsaccing now outshines all other means of dompush and you can forget them altogether, except maybe spamming melancholia on resilient dominion pockets like capitals, where it’s risky to send your pretender or stealthy preachers.
If you can militarily repel the others, only a bloodsaccing nation can hold your dompush at bay at this point, and only then if he has a number of temples and starting dominion equivalent to yours.
Anyway, if it boils down to it, there should very rapidly be only you and him left on the map as the dompush threat would be multiplied for all the others. Then, the endgame should be endgame as usual between the two of you.