Defending your candles
 

Generally, building temples and preaching is the way to defend your dominion. However, is it possible to optimize?-
I mean for example, is it better to have 9 H1 priests preaching in one province or spread out in threes and preaching in three provinces?
When building temples, is it better to build in adjacent provinces or rather in non adjacent provinces (given its best to build temples in *all* provinces, buts hardly very practical)?
What of the following has better preaching potency?
5 H1 priests,
3 H2 priest,
2 H3 priest,
1 H5 priest,
With and w/o temple?-
Is it a simple linear equation?- N*H or N*2H (N, # priests, H- holy level)

What if you don't care about losing dominions in your lands but rather have a specific province you absolutely must have your dominion? (for example, when LA R'lyeh is your neighbor)

Any further tip on the subject would be most welcome :)

Re: Defending your candles
 

H1 priests can only raise dominion above a certain level. iirc it's something like their base holy level (x2 if they're at a temple) +1. I'm probably wrong there, but I'll be corrected. It's pretty widely known.

If you absolutely must have dominion in a certain province, using priests preaching is far more effective than raising dominion spread in other ways. Stationing something with domspread there may also do the trick, though it isn't certain to be added to the dominion of that province, so still, preaching is better.

Re: Defending your candles
 

P94 of the manual gives a preaching formula. It looks like H1 priests aren't worth much when preaching. H2 priests are good workhorses for preaching duty, and H3 are excellent. H4-5 will counter enemy dominion effectively, although dominion change in this way may not be an effective use of their time.

Sombre is right about the priest level cap on preaching dominion, so don't expect multiple H1 priests to give much of an effect.

Re: Defending your candles
 

Sombre is correct about H1 priests. But on many occasions I have put 10+ indy H1 priests to preach in a province and have seen that there is a stack of effect. By that I do not mean I get the effect of one H10 priest, but rather each priest gets a check for the dominion influence and you can effect a change of 4 or more candles in a single turn. Once you get 3 or more candles in a province the H1 priests have no further effect on dominion.

Re: Defending your candles
 

I usually take lower dominion on nations with H3's, as just a few H3's can get your dominion to 6-7 in 2-3 turns of preaching.

You can't beat H3's, H2's and H1's are not worth the bother unless your desperate.

Re: Defending your candles
 

I hardly ever really bother with thinking about my dominion, my border province usually have 1-2 black candles. (usually only build temples if needed to recruit mages in key castles) Does that really work much against me? Most races with 400 gc temples would need to invest quite a lot in them to get dominion spreading outwards.. is that really worth it?

Re: Defending your candles
 

It would depend on if you were using dominion as part of your strategy (temperature, death, magic, unluck, spells such as Wrath of God, carrion theme, etc). And how strong a dominion your god came with. Some nations can get along ignoring it, and others would die almost instantly if they ignored it.

Re: Defending your candles
 

Spreading your dominion can make quite a difference depending on what nation you're playing.

Temperature scales impact your income. In a worst case scenario you're giving up 30% of your income from those provinces with a 6 off shift in temperature. How significant that is depends on how much of your empire is affected, and how much the temperature shift is.

Likewise, order shift is important. Even outside of the worst case scenario where you have order-3 and your neighbor has sloth-3, lets look at the more likely scenario that you both have order-3. You're giving up another 27% of income by not having your beneficial order dominion there.

Growth/death and production/sloth is similar, but less dramatic assuming you don't have your production centers out of dominion.

Luck/Misfortune - whether your neighbor has luck or misfortune doesn't matter - it's all misfortune to you. Under the thought that good luck for your neighbor is bad luck for you, a Luck-3 enemy dominion will act like Misfortune for you. It's very bad to have enemy Turmoil/luck dominion! Few people take misfortune-3, but luck-3 isn't terribly uncommon and assuming you've got an order-3 dominion you're looking at nearly a 60% decrease from that shift alone before the bad events hit you!

All said and done, depending on the scales involved it's not hard to be looking at something on the order of losing 50% of your income from the provinces with enemy scales, possibly considerably more.

Also, friendly dominion gives +1 morale, hostile a -1. A 2 point swing in morale is fairly huge for most PD.


Also, everything I said goes in reverse as well. How much is it worth to push your dominion into your neighbor's lands?

Re: Defending your candles
 

Nicely stated Baalz.

Re: Defending your candles
 

Enemy dominion can have negative effects as Baalz has elaborated. Its possible to make dominion kills and in-fact I have done so a couple of times in MP. Its a good strat. when the enemy doesn't control many provinces but does have some nasty armies/SCs that you don't or can't deal with at the moment.
Also, some enemy dominions hurt real bad, worst example that comes to mind is LA R'lyeh.