Starting w/High Dominion vs. Using Temples

[Dragar]

I'm pretty sure that the actual temple checks are based on your starting dominion? I think the increased dominion only applies to max candles per province and the max number of sacreds you can recruit, not the actual checks. Assuming that's right then all of those 45 temples are much stronger with high dominion

That aside it takes a long time to accumulate a lot of temples, the dominion push early is significant and will likely affect your expansion and scale spread - therefore high starting dominion's importance depends a lot on what your scales are like.