Finished Three Houses on Overwhelming
Don't bother with any other units except grenadiers on her. Spam their buildings and do all their research, it's sooo worth it. Won all three maps just doing that.
The bow artifact was amazing, having all my grenadiers do 2 attacks from the start just massacres everyone. It's a must have. Map 3 would have been way harder without it.
In terms of skills I've gotten a little unlucky. Channeling and raider are pretty bad skills for her - all the damage you deal is via troops, not magic. Would have much preferred Order, would have worked amazingly well.
I was never a fan of essence leach, but I liked it here. You must think carefully witch units to prioritize, but in exchange you can sustain your offensive better.
Last battle of mission two was rather hard, the walls really do their work there. But if you gather the right bonuses from map locations beforehand and think carefully who to kill first you can exchange teleport half their wall units with your own. From there they are easy pickings.
Siege battles are the only situations when this build struggled. I imagine it could also have a problem against enemies with ranged attack reduction, but there was no wielders like that in campaign.
The other two wielders are even more useless here than they were in previous campaigns. They are just too low level and too mediocre skill do do anything - sure, if you recruit fitting troops they can gang up two on one, but it's not worth it.
Would have had more problems with finishing this one if Roots actually attacked me. I knew from doing it on worthy that Vanir would keep stabbing me in the back if I focused on Roots, so I attacked them first. In general I'm against exploiting the map design, but here it was an accident so whatever.
In terms of story it was decent, nothing exceptional. There was much less lore tablets and such compared to main 4, which was disappointing. It's really amusing that Aurelia did all that work trying to destroy the Roots fully, while Yuan was keeping them as dangerous pets. Considering their mixed record, I bet Aurelia actually succeeded only for some to flee Yuan captivity.
I wonder what will be their reaction to what happens in the west. Roots and Rana are allied, and so are Barya and Arleon (though their alliance is shaky at beast). Will they ally with Aurelians? Considering their transcendents, they might be more open to their ideas than western humans were. So far Aurelia doesn't have a stellar record as far as diplomacy goes, so we shall see.
As a faction they are a bit weird. Troops focused wielders have plenty of tools, but essence ones have a hard time I think. There are no units that have more than three essence pips, and even three are rare and there is none that can generate essence. If you want to use essence to support troops then it's fine, but if you want to use it offensively it works much worse. Compare tools Meilin or Ru have to that of Rana or Loth essence wielders - it's pathetic. Their units also tend toward tricks more than raw power. Especially the higher end ones.