The Crusade mode really just opened up to me and so far I'm mostly just finding it easy. There's not a ton of mechanics to it, there's no attacks of opportunity. So the obvious best strategy is to just do as much damage as possible as quickly as possible, and have a giant infirmary to deal with the losses.

I reloaded an earlier save and

I've also used Toybox for respecs, working around bugs like a certain secret not opening even though I had the items, etc. Also just faster map navigation like if you have to go through an interior several times to get back out, I'll just teleport down off the walls instead. Not cheating, just saving 2 pointless loads.