My pretender died for no reason!

[KissBlade]

This could also be the dominion explosion bug mentioned before. I do know there is some weird issues with dominion suddenly getting vanished out of the blue but I forget what're the specifics.

[HoneyBadger]

I had this happen to me twice, the first time I was just starting, maybe had 5-6 provinces, and poof, all gone. The second time I had an enormous empire, probably 30+ provinces, and my whole empire disappeared out from under me. Both times it was because of low domain. Suddenly, I took a much greater interest in all those cheapo priests with 1 level of holiness you can recruit all over the place.

[ceremony]

I haven't had any game end on me yet with my dominion suddenly disappearing. That's not to say such a bug doesn't exist, but with a new player, I would suspect this was simply a dominion loss. Shadowblade, take a quick look at the bullet points in the manual on p. 92. As Honey Badger said, dominion is something new players often overlook, until they feel its ill effects.

[ShadowBlade]

Perhaps that's the case: everything just disappeared, he didn't die in battle (there was only one message besides the vanquished one, and it was just a random event that increased defense by 10 in some province; irrelevant).

Unfortunately, I don't have the last savegame (overwrote it when I started a new one), so I can't recall the exact last message I got, though it did mention something about his lifeforce and *maybe* that he didn't touch anyone, so it's another argument in support of the dominion death hypothesis.

I remember there were a nasty lot of black candles to the north of my realm, where I was fighting the Abysians (or something like that) near their capital. However, I think the southern provinces were under my dominion. Hard to believe I didn't have a single white candle...

Anyway, I'll keep that in mind. Now, what are the best tactics for increasing my dominion? I assume using priests and have them "Preach the word of God" in provinces, but do they affect neighbouring territories as well? If that's the case, it'd be wise to strategically place them in the same way I place forts. That is, creating a network where each fort affects its own province and neighbours but without interfering with the next fort's area of effect.

[Shovah32]

Place alot of temples, sure they cost 400 gold and are easily destroyed but they give a great boost (and every 5 increases your max dominion by 1). As for preaching, i put the majority of my priests on my borders to hold enemy dominion at bay but i still spread some around my empire so dominion dosnt go down there either.

And yes, priests can affect neighbouring provinces (or else only stealth priests could remove enemy dominion)

[ceremony]

Shovah32 said:
And yes, priests can affect neighbouring provinces

Actually, they do not. Priest preaching only affects the province that they are in.

[Cainehill]

Also, make sure you don't take too low a starting dominion on your pretender. Until you have enough experience to consider subtleties like horrible scales and stealth dominion, you really shouldn't go any lower than 4 for starting dominion, and 5 or 6 is really a much better minimum. This is because higher dominion is harder to push out, and also because of the way temple checks work : with a starting dominion of 2, your temples will _never_ have more than a 20% chance of increasing/spreading dominion, regardless of your maximum dominion from building temples. With starting dominion 6, each has a 60% chance.