Building temples (noob question)

[Saxon]

Yep, getting your dominion any higher than two is going to need temples. Also, temples do a check every turn, while those traveling priests don’t on the turns they move. It adds up over time, especially if you end up pulling the priests into fighting somewhere. Now, the priest is obviously more helpful and flexible in that regard, but they are not a pure dominion item. Also, if you went for scales in your pretender design, you will be wanting to take advantage of them and dominion helps. Finally, those priests are not going to push your dominion into enemy territory, so you won’t get the advantage of fighting in your own dominion except on defense. The temples will push into the neighbor’s backyard and that +1 to morale is very nice in a close fight.

In short, the traveling priest team is a good idea (I plan to steal it) but you need temples as well.

[PhilD]

Also, it appears that the mechanics of dominion spread as described in the manual are wrong - there was some rather intensive testing done some weeks ago, and reported here.

While the manual says that the "strength" of temple checks (the probability that they actually produce a dominion change) scales with the maximum dominion (ie, it's supposed to be 10% per [starting dominion] + [1 per five temples]), it doesn't seem to increase with additional temples (ie, it's only 10% per starting dominion).

So, it seems that starting with a high dominion is actually more important than it seems if you want to push your dominion ahead of you.

[Sheap]

I think some players build too many temples, obviously you can never have too many, but you can build some pretty cool units for the amount of money some players spend on extra temples.

As far as temples in castles or not, now that castles cost a fortune, it makes sense to leave temples out in the open. Back when castles cost less than temples did it was reasonable to give every temple its own castle. Now I think of it more like giving every castle its own temple. But with the high cost of castles, even if you lose some temples to raids, it's still cheaper than trying to protect them all with castles. This is especially true if your nation has a discount on temples.

The effect of temples on preaching is more than just one level higher. It's double, plus one, and the odds of successfully preaching are also increased. Plus you get the automatic temple check. Still, IMO players build too many temples.