New player - Have some questions

Hello everyone, i got bored and was looking for something to play on my ipad and came across this game and decided to check it out.

Now as an ex clash of clans player i have some questions i hope you guys can answer some of those. I just want to make sure this doesn't end up for me like clash of clans did. I've tried to search for these but couldn't find any clear results so decided to ask it.

1- My problem in clash of clans was at the start of the late game (th9-th10) farming resourced for the required upgrades became exteremly hard, army cost and create times was too high and the gain was too low, even if i gone for cheaper army strategies ( like bam/barch if you played CoC) it still took 3-4 hours of nonstop playing to get a single upgrade. not to mention if you go offline for a single minute during that, you get raided for like half of your everything. Now is this game becomes like that too or is it more forgiving on that ?

2-How is the hero balances ? i've been looking around in this subreddit to get a vague idea and see the vlad and pumpkin names a lot. and looking at wiki it says geting spirit mage and chieftain requires few hundreds $ worth of gems purchase. this got me wondering if the game is scaled more towards Pay to Win than the general Pay to Skip. If that so it's a huge no to me.

3-If you still can recommend this game to me despite my first two concerns, is it worth buying gems once at start to get extra few builders, and how easy it is to get gems ingame while playing ?

4- One last thing, i've seen people restart the game to reroll for a specific starter hero or something like that, is that necessary ? or will i benefit from doing it since i have zero progress atm anyway?