Dominion: spread, contest and scales

How a god's faith spreads from pretender, temples and prophets, how it is pushed back, how it can eliminate a rival, and what each scale does to a province.

verified 6.37updated 2026-10-02 · Jake14 min read

Dominion is the second map your game plays on. The first is military: whose army holds a province. The second is religious: whose god the people there believe in. The two are kept apart on purpose, and many of the game’s quieter numbers, from tax income to how a sacred unit feels about a fight, hang on the second one.

This page covers how dominion is held, spread and attacked, and what it does once it is there. Its design-time side, meaning what a candle or a scale click costs on the pretender screen, is on Pretender design and is not repeated here. Everything below is the manual’s own account. We have not re-measured it.

What dominion is

Each province carries a dominion value. A positive value belongs to you and shows on the map as white candles, with more candles for a stronger hold. A negative value belongs to someone else and shows as dark candles. Only one pretender can hold dominion in a province at a time, so a province at -3 to you is at -3 to everyone except the one nation exerting +3 there. A province can be at high dominion while its neighbour is at low, and a province with no believers at all sits at zero.

Two display keys are worth knowing. One toggles the dominion view of the map and another toggles the capsule view of income, resources and dominion for every province. The reach of your dominion also shows as a yellow outline. As with other province facts, you only see the candles where you have some way to learn them. A priest in a province can tell you whose dominion it is, and scrying shows its strength and owner.

The first thing to absorb is that conquest does nothing here. An army can march across a continent and leave the faith of every province it takes untouched. Only a handful of things move dominion, and they are the next sections.

The ceiling on a province

A nation’s dominion strength, chosen at design time, is the base of its ceiling. Temples then add to it:

• the highest dominion you can have in any one province is the pretender’s initial strength, plus one for every full group of temples, where a group is five temples times the number of players on your team;
• in a game without teams a group is five temples, so ten temples add two.

The manual’s example is a two-per-team game with twelve temples and a pretender of strength 3: twelve is less than two groups of ten, so one is added, and the ceiling is 4.

Where dominion comes from

Faith flows out of a small set of centres, never out of armies. Those are your pretender, your capital, every temple and your prophet. Team games add disciples, and games with Thrones of Ascension add the thrones you hold. That is why land around your capital is nearly always firmly yours.

The unit of spread is the temple check. Each check has a chance of success equal to 50 per cent plus 5 per cent of your ceiling. The manual’s example is a god with initial strength 7 and eight temples: the ceiling is 8 and each check succeeds 90 per cent of the time, which becomes 95 per cent with two more temples. The sources produce checks like this:

• Pretender: a guaranteed rise of one, and two checks on top.
• Home province: one check.
• Prophet: one check.
• Each temple: one check.
• Each disciple: one check.
• Each claimed Throne of Ascension: from one to seven checks, depending on the throne. A throne must be claimed with the Claim Throne order, by a pretender, a prophet or a level 3 priest, before it spreads anything.

What a check does depends on the province it lands in:

• Neutral province: dominion goes to +1 straight away.
• Your own dominion: the chance of rising by one is 30 per cent minus 3 per cent for every level you already have there. If it does not rise, the spread goes to a random neighbouring province instead. A check can therefore reach far, as long as every province in between is already yours.
• Enemy dominion: the chance of lowering it by one is 50 per cent, plus 5 per cent of your ceiling, minus 5 per cent of the enemy’s level there. High enemy dominion is hard to wear away and low enemy dominion is easy. A line of strong provinces acts as what the manual calls a wall of faith.

Random spread tends to stay on one side of a shoreline. When the drawn target is sea and the source is land, or the other way round, half the time the game throws that target away and picks another random province.

The game applies all of this once a turn, in the turn sequence: preaching in step 6, heretic preaching in step 7, the spread itself in step 42 and the special effects of dominion in step 43.

Prophets, temples and the nations that differ

You can appoint exactly one prophet, with the Become Prophet order. The unit’s priest level goes up by one, or to 3 if that is higher. It gains 2 each to attack, defence and precision, spreads like a temple, and is affected by dominion in hit points, strength and magic resistance exactly as a pretender is. If it dies, you wait six turns before naming a successor. Disciple games have no prophet: a disciple’s pretender counts as a prophet of the god nation, and the whole team shares one overall dominion.

You can only build a temple in a province you hold. If an enemy captures the province, the temple is destroyed immediately.

Some nations spread by blood instead of, or as well as, by temples. The manual says a priest of such a nation may sacrifice up to as many blood slaves as his level in a temple province, and each slave is one temple check. For Mictlan in the early and late eras this is the only way to spread apart from the pretender, whose own checks are half as effective, and neither its home province, prophet nor temples spread anything. Several other nations can do both, with sacrifices added to the normal sources.

Preaching

A priest with the Preach order can raise dominion in his own province only. The chance is 30 per cent times his level, minus 5 per cent for each level of enemy dominion present. A temple in the province counts as half a level more. The manual’s example is a level 1 priest in a province at -4: 30 minus 20 leaves 10 per cent, or 25 per cent with a temple. In neutral or friendly dominion nothing is subtracted.

Three more rules limit it:

• preaching cannot take a province above twice the priest’s effective level, so a level 2 priest tops out at 4, or 5 with a temple;
• when the aim is to wear down enemy dominion, the chance never falls below 5 per cent;
• the temple bonus is separate from the temple’s own spread check and does not carry to a neighbour.

An inquisitor counts as double level when preaching against enemy dominion, giving 60 per cent per level minus 5 per cent per enemy level. In neutral or friendly dominion it does no better than any priest of its level. The manual warns that a priest left on Preach after the province has reached the cap keeps his order but achieves nothing, and the game will not tell you again.

Heretics work in the other direction. A heretic in a province has a chance to lower any pretender’s dominion there equal to its Heretic ability times 20 per cent, so they can hurt you at home or be sent against an enemy. Some are stealthy.

Pushing it back, and dominion death

Dominion is contested in three ways: by temple checks and prophets in neighbouring provinces, by priests preaching, and by heretics. Because conquest changes nothing, taking an enemy province does not by itself change who believes there.

The manual also gives dominion a way to win a game outright. A pretender with no friendly dominion anywhere on the map is out of the game, which it calls the Tinkerbell Effect. This is a total over the whole map, not a single province. Its practical use is against a rival in his last fortress: besieging it while your pretender wears the faith away can finish him with no battle at all. The last steps of the turn sequence agree, eliminating players who have neither provinces nor dominion.

When a pretender dies the effect on dominion is different and smaller. The manual says each death costs either one point of dominion strength or one magic skill level. The chance of losing magic is higher with Nature skill, and strength is lost when no magic is. A pretender never falls below strength 1. A god that is dominion immortal and dies inside friendly dominion loses nothing. The full rules are on Pretender design, and the Call God order is how a dead god returns.

What a scale does per click

The scales you chose at design time spread with your dominion, but they do not arrive at once. Each turn a province is under your dominion, each of its scales has a small chance of tipping one step toward your setting. That chance is 5 per cent times the province’s dominion level, plus 10 per cent times the gap between the province’s scale and yours. A big gap makes a province move quickly, and a close one slows it. Strong dominion helps, but the manual says it counts for half as much as the gap does. With weak dominion, scales may never reach your full setting.

Per click, the manual’s effects table gives:

• Order: income +3 per cent, resources +2 per cent, recruitment +10 per cent, unrest reduction +1, random events 2 per cent fewer. Turmoil is the mirror image of all five.
• Productivity: income +3 per cent and resources +15 per cent. Sloth is the reverse.
• Heat and cold: each step away from a race’s ideal setting cuts tax by 5 per cent and supplies by 10 per cent.
• Growth: population growth +0.2 per cent a month, supplies +10 per cent, income +1 per cent. Death is the reverse.
• Fortune: 5 per cent more random events, with a 10 per cent better chance that an event is good, and a 0.5 per cent higher chance of a national hero. Misfortune has the same extra events, a worse chance of a good one and a lower hero chance.
• Magic: spells are harder to resist, because every unit in the province has 0.5 less magic resistance per step (rounded down). Casting is 10 per cent less tiring per step, and friendly mages gain 1 research point plus 50 starting research points per step. Drain is the reverse, and its research penalty applies to every mage, not only friendly ones.

With Magic and Drain at neutral, a research project starts with 150 points, and the chance of a national hero is 3 per cent a month.

Extreme scales

The manual advises against scales of 4 or more. Those bring extra effects, while most bad scales gain nothing more because five of them is already bad enough. In a province at the listed level:

• Order 4 or more: research -2, or -4 at Order 5.
• Productivity 4 or more: unrest rises by 1 to 5 a month, or 1 to 15 at Productivity 5.
• Heat or Cold 4 or more: population falls 0.4 per cent a month, or 1 per cent at 5.
• Death 4 or more: forests and farms slowly turn to plains, and plains to wasteland.
• Growth 4 or more: plains slowly turn into forest or farms (farms need Order too) and seas into kelp forests. At Growth 5 farms turn into forest.
• Fortune 4 or more: income and resources fall 5 per cent, or 15 per cent at Fortune 5.
• Magic 4 or more: horrors thrive and horror marks start to appear; unrest rises 1 to 5 a month, or 1 to 15 at Magic 5.

Scales of 4 or more also begin to spread into neighbouring provinces, including those under a rival’s dominion.

Temperature depends on more than dominion. Summer shifts a province one step warmer and winter one step colder, caves and outer planes ignore the seasons, deep seas stay neutral, and other seas can only reach one step either way. Some nations cope better with the heat or cold they like: Abysia and Niefelheim count a fortified province as one or two steps milder when the population-killing effect is worked out.

Where it touches the rest of the game

The manual mentions dominion in many other places. These are the ones it states:

• Income and population. A province’s base income is its population divided by 100, then multiplied by the scale modifiers and by fort administration, and divided by one plus 0.02 per point of unrest. Growth, Death, patrol, pillage, random events and dominion all change population.
• Supplies. Population-based supply is changed by the Growth and Death scales and then by the Heat and Cold scales. In the manual’s example, a province of 21,000 people with Growth 1 and Heat 3 starts at 600, adds 20 per cent, takes away 30 per cent of the 600, and ends at 540 before any fort supply.
• Unrest and events. Order and Turmoil change unrest and the event rate, Fortune and Misfortune change how good the events are, and the changes in unrest from dominion, scales and patrols are applied together in step 39.
• Magic. Divine insight researchers in a laboratory count only up to the dominion strength in the province. The Sloth scale helps philosophers. Many global enchantments only work inside their caster’s dominion, or work better there, and pushing out enemy dominion is the manual’s defence against them. The Gift of Health enchantment cures afflictions inside its caster’s dominion.
• Morale. Fighting in friendly dominion gives a point of morale and fighting in enemy dominion takes one; the full list is on Morale and rout.
• Pretenders and prophets. For each level of friendly dominion where they stand, a pretender or prophet gains 1 strength, half a point of magic resistance and 10 per cent hit points. Each level of enemy dominion takes the same away, with hit points never falling below 10 per cent.
• Blessings. Pretenders and disciples are blessed automatically inside their own dominion and nowhere else. Sacred troops fighting alongside the pretender are covered if the battle is in friendly dominion.
• Blood hunts. Strong dominion persuades commoners that sacrifice is an honour. At strength 10, almost no one refuses.
• Reanimation. Reanimating manikins is much less effective in enemy dominion.

Special dominions

A few nations have extra rules, listed in the manual. Arcoscephale scrys every province under its dominion and sees hidden enemies. Mictlan’s dominion is the dying kind described above. Yomi gets Oni in its temples, more of them with a high Turmoil scale. R’lyeh spreads insanity and brings void dreamers. Ermor’s dominion raises the dead and also senses unburied corpses. Asphodel’s turns the dead into manikins. C’tis turns land to swamp, harms the income of enemies and helps its own. Agartha’s gives constructs extra hit points. Phaeacia’s lets commanders sail between friendly-dominion provinces. For several of these the manual says a disciple of that god meets the same effects as an enemy would.

What the manual leaves out

• It gives two chances for a temple check, 50 per cent plus 5 per cent of the ceiling and, once a province is already friendly, 30 per cent minus 3 per cent of its level. It does not spell out how the two combine.
• Its two copies of the scale table are not identical: the Dominion chapter’s adds the hero-chance lines for Fortune and Misfortune.
• It does not say what the spread of a scale of 4 or more does to the neighbour’s own dominion, only that the scale spreads.
• It lists Fortune at 4 or more as lowering income, an odd result for the favourable side, and gives no explanation.