I'm vary familiar with Illwinter and Dom3.
The reason I never bothered with Dom4 was because the insane amount of micro required to play later into games did not seem to be addressed. It's a great game though, and a great company, but to play it seriously simply requires too much micro for me to enjoy. So I believe the user reviews, and I can look at change logs, but none of that really tells me if it still takes an hour to run your turns when you reach the 20s or 30s. Scripting battles, managing recruitment, handling spells, forging, ...
There's a lot to love, but it's just too difficult to manage on bigger maps and longer games.
