What should I write? "I'm now writing specifically to you, Ash!" ?
As for DoE being deeper than DotA. First let's look at DotA - what do you have to do there? Buy items, go and creep, kill a hero if possible, gank, avoid ganks, buy better items, win. One base per team, 3 lanes, forest with creeps and shops, stupid golem with a renamed Ankh. That's all, nothing more, pretty much every AoS involves that (excluding the golem ofc, and different base/lane setups). There are no systems or creative game mechanics. Thing that makes DotA stand out are units spawning out of nowhere, no matter if the barracks exist or not.
As a result, you know what do straight away, you fully understand the map after one game. Later you just learn the heroes and items, memorise. Which is not really a skill gamewise, in ladder you also have to know a lot (though not that much), and it requires 100x more skill than DotA. Btw, DoE is also much easier than ladder, but it's not dumb.
Now let's look at DoE. First off, conditions system. You won't get it straight away and you have to play several heroes to see how it works. They're basically negative buffs organised into a system.
Second- lanes and bases. In DotA, all lanes are pretty much the same, the middle one is a tad shorter and you can switch from easier, but that's geommetry, lol. In DoE, side lanes function separately from the middle. That means that at start, you have 3 places to defend. If you lose side outposts, you are left with one, but that's a bad thing. Also, you can hire additional spawns - for pushing and repelling pushes. That makes teamwork much more interesting. To destroy a base, you must distract the enemy, absorb them with something else, kill several units and use their respawn time, multiple ways for it. That also enables different hero roles. One can maintain (heal) or boost (aura) creep pushes, the other can kill heroes so they can't push or don't farm your creeps with AoE spells.
Now about monehz. In DotA it's for items, and that's it. Here you have to balance it. You can spend faction on items, but you can also hire one of the more powerful creeps. To get faction, you have to kill heroes. But if you farm a lot instead, then you have more gold for creeps. The best way is to do both, but that depends on the hero.
Usually the game ends after one side has their side outpost(s) pwnt, and afterwards a middle push comes, so they fight on 2 frontlines. But I played games where a side won through a powerful middle push, or a game where both bases were being pwnt at the same time, one through side lanes, the other through middle. And one of the sides (mine
) won by 3 seconds or so.
Oh well, I should ask Ves to post his reasoning, he's better at it. But I think you get my points. Learning =/= memorising. DotA is too simple (imo). It's inferior to DoE in the same way Warcraft 1 or 2 is inferior to Warcraft 3 (maybe not THAT much, but DotA get's pawned visually as well). Warcraft 3 is more developed and complex (but not overcomplicated) than the previous ones, DoE is more complex than DotA (but not overcomplicated as well, EotA:T is, for example).
