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2. People say it's hard sometimes, but in my opinion the basics aren't that tough, it's just getting good at it that takes a lot of time. But you can play against other people after just a few singleplayer games and you'll only get your ass handed to you a little bit.
3. Yes, definitely. You'll probably want to read the description of what stats and abilities do at various points though.
It really depends on what you like about Total War.
IMO, Total War is harder to play than Dominions. It has far more buttons, fiddly details , busy UI elements etc. If you can wrap your head around total war, you can easily understand Dominions. I bought Dom 5 and Warhammer 3 within the same week. I have more hours in Dominions, and I "get" it more than I do warhammer 3, where I still don't understand half of the things popping up on my screen every turn.
The depth of dominions is in the breadth of playstyles. All of the nations are pretty different from one another. What works for one won't work for another. That gives Dominions a strategic depth that is pretty rare in 4x gaming, or even gaming in general.
Total War does a few things better. It looks more cinematic. If you want to visually see the fantasy battles of your dreams play out before you, and you don't want to use imagination, then you would prefer total war. I also find myself impressed by Total War AI at times, while dominions I can't say one way or the other as to how clever it can be yet.
In total war, units are 200 nameless individuals that are treated sort of as one pseudo unit that moves and operates as one. Only a few such individuals ever fight at a time, while the rest sort of stand there. Not so in Dominions. Every unit is simulated. Their wounds carry over from battle to battle. They get worn down. In that regard, Dominions is a much deeper simulation of each person on the battle field, but there are certainly fewer soldiers in a battle ( though Dom 6 has much larger battles than Dom 5 ).
Dominions has a MUCH better MP experience. Total War MP is janky, and having to play synchronously sucks if you want to play with more than one other person. Dominions MP is very straight forward, whether you want to play COOP or against friends.
Another big ffactor. In Total War, you control units through the battle. In Dominions, you only set them up with initial orders. Once fighting starts, it's out of your hands. This means more time for you to watch and enjoy the fight, but iit also means the battle is won or lost before it happens.
I love Dominions and Total War. I find Dominions easier to load up and start playing than Total War. The UI of total war sucks compared to Dominions, but Dominions does have more micro outside of battle, and less so inside of battle.
So Dominions is more strategic than Total war, but less tactical. You will spend more time on the campaign map in Dominions, while in Total War you spend more time in the battle map.
So as a total war fan, who loves Warhammer 3, I also love Dominions, and 6 is so much improved over 5, which is still great. If you autoresolve many battles in total war, then Dominions is likely going to cater to you moreso. If you want to simulate fantasy battles from childhood books and movies, Dominions has more ways to simulate such things, but you have to use your imagination a bit.
This is a really good question.
1. I think it is a more complex game with a steeper learning curve than total war. It also has an arguably less friendly UI with more reliance on hotkeys. However if you are able to do well in total war, I think you are more than capable of learning and enjoying dominions 6. It shows you have an understanding of strategy, tactics, and logistics.
2. There are two sttep parts of the learning curve. When you first play and may feel overwhelmed - this can be dealt with by just pushing onward and by talking to other more experienced players. Then again when you play multiplayer games and realise just how good some players are and how little you know. This second steep part of the curve doesn't actually need to be overcome, you can enjoy the game without winning multiplayer games, but it is also an exciting challenge if you are into that sort of thing.
3. Yes, I'd say it's very enjoyable to learn. Actually this is one of the strongest features of the game - learning something, trying it out, and then actually seeing it work drastically well, or only barely fail. It is part of the reason people enjoy watching others play dominions so much.
Also, you didn't ask, but if you enjoy the total war games because of the theme, there are both vanilla Dominions nations (roman style ones, samurai themed, gaul style, etc) and mod nations (e.g. warhammer) that may be very appealing to you.
Nope. It's indie game, INDIE, it's meant same as AAA-titles, but with dull simplistic gameplay, terrible UI, ugly character design and graphics. It's just bad quality product.
my one caution is that it can take a bit of learning (youtube tutorial videos even) to understand how to create a god and pick spells and a faction that have synergy. It is absolutely worth it though when a huge battle comes together and you watch all your warriors and giants and wizards and demons and serpents and myriad other monsters and soldiers tear into each other
like graphically nowhere near as satisfying as TW: Warhammer 3 of course (though i actually deeply love the pixel art), but the range of units is huge and a lot very interesting battles can happen, throw in the story events and random events and apocalypse scenarios and world shifting magics and you end up with crazy stories for each campaign too
As someone in OP's shoes, I feel exactly opposite. Total War UI sucks compared to Dominions. 50+ hours later in both games, I still don't understand half of what I'm looking at in Total War, but I feel comfortable in Dominions.
Granted, Dominions has more varied playstyles, and is strategically atleast as deep or more so, but I find learning to play Dominions a very elegant and straight forward process. Dominion spread is a simple concept compared to the multiple types of chaos in Warhammer3, how they spread, how to see them, and what they do, as just one example.
1) & 2) The game is very intuitive on a basic level to play. Most of the UI is very straight-forward, though some deeper mechanics are nested. You will want to go read some guides after getting to grips with the basics for how to script / build good formations / do magic / etc; but the great thing is the while the game is very complex, the individual systems are not. The complexity is about how the systems relate to each other.
It is easier to jump in and play Dominions than it is to jump in and play Medieval TW, and probably about as easy as TW: Warhammer.
HOWEVER
Unlike in TW, you need to do Pretender Creation, and this is a bit of a barrier to entry. It isn't HARD, but it also isn't very intuitive and makes the classic CRPG error of having new players make a bunch of decisions up front that they have no context for.
IMHO, one of the best things to do for your first game is just choose Middle Age, pick Ulm, and then don't even worry about pretender design. Leave the points on the table and start a 1v1 match against an Easy AI. That way you can just get to grips with the fundamental combat layer of the game without worrying about anything else.
After that, and picking-up on some of the inherit grammar of play, go watch some Pretender design tutorials and build up your knowledge from there.
It is a much richer experience than TW but doesn't have to be any harder to get into (IMHO)
3) It honestly depends on how much you enjoy engaging with paratextual material (wikis, YouTube guides, etc). If you have fun watching guide videos and reading well written wikis, you'll have fun learning the game. I've never done it myself, but apparently you can also purchase a physical manual like you'd get for a game in Ye Olde Tymes from Illwinter, and apparently they do an amazing job with it if you love having printed material, and this is also apparently a great way to learn the game's systems.
If you don't want to do any of that... WELP. The game doesn't have any in-game tutorials and, IMHO problematically, for some things offers literally no in game explanations whatsoever. Want to play with communions? You either must read a guide or watch a video or have the manual, And that's true for an almost shocking number of systems.
If you're a Total Warrior this probably isn't a problem, given that TW also has a bunch of super-esoteric and yet also very important systems that are never explained in the game? But then again those systems aren't quite as core to the rules of a given TW title as the unexplained stuff in Dominions is.
EXTRA NOTES:
Here are things I love about Dominions that is just does SO MUCH BETTER than TW:
- Chariots just work. They rampage around as you would expect a chariot to do. You don't have to see a chariot option and experience trauma just thinking about the micro-management.
- SEMs just work. They are neither invincible nor useless. Fantastic.
- All of the jank is just absent. Units clash into each other and actually do attacks instead of standing around waiting for an animation timer's cooldown. Fights feels like fights.
- Cavalry charges just work and feel awesome in a way that they haven't felt in TW since, like, Medieval I.
- Magic is simultaneously much more impressive and also harder to use correctly. You will feel amazing when you get a script just right for your mages and they spectacularly DO THE THING you wanted. You will be frustrated when you make a simple blunder that causes a stack wipe against you. I wouldn't argue it is better per se because few things in this world feel as satisfying as a good TW Wind of Death or Burning Head cast... but it is definitely on par.
- Different weapon systems just work and feel different. There isn't the perpetual TW problem of 'oops this patch the halberds don't work lol, sorry about that'.
- A lot of it is honestly that Dominions just. ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Works. I love TW and think that the Immortal Empires campaign is one of the most amazing and visually spectacular things ever done for a video game, and I still sometimes can't quite believe it when I watch a dragon chase around some Chaos mans on magical frisbees... but, frankly, a lot of it just doesn't work. Animations make combat janky, projectiles seem impossible to balance, SEMs just feel wrong most of the time, the way knockdown is implemented is incredibly frustrating, there is just so much KLUDGE and all of it necessary to make the game playable at all.
Dominions, by contrast, Just Works. You can put together incredibly complicated scripts and formations and stack spells in creative ways and deploy point-buffing units and all of it JUST WORKS. I have never felt like I needed to wait around for a patch in Dominions before a faction was playable or a mechanic was useable, whereas I constantly find myself in that mindset when playing TW.
Oh ALSO in Dominions you will constantly actually complete campaigns. If you set up a huge ♥♥♥♥ off campaign then, yeah, probably it will exhaust you before you finish it... but there's no need to ever do that. It is super easy to customize games to be JUST the right length, and to hard-cap turns via the Cataclysm system.
Dominions also has enough unique things about it that in the end, it's quite different from Total War games. TW is a good entry-point for a lot of people to get acquainted with 4x-style gameplay.
Dominions, in my opinion, is not a good entry point for most people. There's simply too much going on. It's for people who are looking for "more" from their strategy games, who don't mind graphical lo-fidelity.
If you are a "min max - optimizer", deep dive player, I recommend:
Google for "dominions 5" "nation guides" on forums and youtube and if you like what you see, this game is for you!
If you like just to jump in and play quickly, just do that, read maybe a bit of the manual (really good quality) and/or check out one of the beginner/intro youtube videos which came out for Dominions 6!
Dominions love for detail and lore and how it is reflected down to different gameplay options makes this title very unique.
I am in a similar boat, big fan of both series. WHTW2 is one of my favourite games of all time. They actually do share a lot of the features I enjoy, like building armies of dudes with cool lore and sparking my imagination with the battles.