Minimum dominion?

[Lingchih]

Sombre said:
The best way to quickly domkill someone is with massed H3 blood saccing. That's something LA Marig can do better than anyone else, more or less.

Other than that, burn down their temples, kill their prophet and god, kill their priests with remote spells,.. all the obvious stuff.

With Pan, you can also mass stealthy, fairly inexpensive dryad preachers in key spots. Dom killed Nief early with that tactic once.

[Saxon]

So nations that can blood saccing can pursue a pure dominion strategy, but everyone else has to do the military/build strategy. The military solution is also easier to defend against. If you know there are no blood sacc nations in your game, would it then suggest you could then risk a lower dominion in your pretender design?

[Twan]

I think the size / start positions of the map decides it.

On big maps or maps with spaced fixed positions I'd use even dom 3 or 4.

On typical random 15 or less prov/player maps where capitols may be only 3 provinces away I'd rather take 5 minimum, and usually 6-8 if my pretender isn't awake.

Also scales are a thing to consider. Taking good scales is a waste when your dominion is too low.

[Sombre]

I'd say dominion kill, if you see it coming, is extremely easy to defend against. Unless they own so much of the map that you can't build enough priests to preach in your home province and stay alive. In which case they could probably have outmuscled you more easily militarily.

As far as I'm concerned there is no 'pure dominion strategy'. If you pursue one you will lose horribly.

[PvK]

Yeah, it depends a LOT on the competition: How strong their dominion is, whether they are pushing it and how, how many of them there are, and how much space there is on the map.

IIRC, a couple of my edge cases:
I've succeeded in MP with a rainbow mage with dominion strength 4 at least once, on a medium map with about eight players. I got dominion-killed by surprise with dominion strength 6 once, on a small map with about three close neighbors and about four distant neighbors.