My pretender died for no reason!

[curtadams]

I just ran a test and can confirm that building more temples does NOT increase the chance of a successful dominion check. I took an imprisoned Dom 1 pretender, made no prophet, and built 9 additional temples (for 10). That "should" give a 30% check chance. But in 6 turns, with 11 checks per turn (10 temples plus home province), I got 5 pops. That's 200 times more likely if additional temples do not increase the chance of each dominion check, so we can pretty much conclude that I was still getting 10% dominion checks even with 10 temples.

[PhilD]

Yeah, I was thinking of doing something like this, but wasn't sure how to run the test. Are you sure there was no interference from opponents' dominion? (unlikely if the map was big enough)

[curtadams]

I took a large map and only one, easy, opponent. His dominion did reach my provinces but it didn't reach the area I had dominion in (due to my low dominion, no prophet, and no pretender, only 7 of 30 or so of my provinces had my dominion, so I had a good neutral buffer).

[Maltrease]

Wow. This can make a HUGE difference on larger games (especially single player).

I've often gone with a Dominion of 3 or 4 with the intention that once I build 20 or more temples I will overcome that weakness. But with this you are essentially permanently *screwed* if you start off with a very low dominion.

Does the starting dominion play any role on the "success" of your dominion knocking down a rival pretenders dominion? Or is that based on your current maximum?

[ceremony]

According to the developers, the dominion spread mechanism in Dom3 works as described in the manual: increasing your maximum dominion by building temples increases the chance of spread.

[Graeme Dice]

Awesome. Thanks for the information.

[curtadams]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works. Can Dominion pops get lost? I just ran a more extreme test and got a somewhat different result. I took no prophet and imprisoned pretender, as before, and played fake multiplayer so I didn't have to worry about the computer (duh...) This time the other player was far enough away to have no effect. I build 15 priests and then all at once built 15 extra temples, raising my maximum dominion to 4 (I checked on the recruitment screen). Anyway, I have 16 temples + home province = 17 checks. I forwarded through 6 turns. Expectations are:

No dominion improvement: 17*6*.1 = 10.2 pops
Dominion improvement: 17*6*0.4 = 40.8 pops

I actually got 18. This is way too few for the full improvement (p<.0001 cumulative that or below) but is a bit high for no improvement (p = .01 cumulative that or above). It's certainly not working the way I understand the manual, but what exactly is going on?

[Sheap]

I think the chances of a dominion increase happening are smaller the higher the current dominion is relative to the maximum. So, if some of your "pops" were spent raising dominion 3 to 4 in your inner provinces, some of them probably got lost.