My pretender died for no reason!

[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.

[ceremony]

Cainehill said:
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.

That actually isn't quite how it works: temple checks are based on maximum dominion, so building additional temples will increase your dominion spread chance.

[Agrajag]

ceremony said:

That actually isn't quite how it works: temple checks are based on maximum dominion, so building additional temples will increase your dominion spread chance.

Which IIRC is unlike dom2, which is probably why Cainehill got confused

[ceremony]

I believe it was the same in Dom2 - when I wrote this part of the manual, I used the old Dom2 dominion .pdf I wrote as a model, and this part was unchanged. In any case, I am just correcting a point of confusion with the rules - I am not criticizing.