[Amorphous]

While I agree with most of what you are saying, I find that you downplay the Virtue's province grabbing abilities a bit too much.

She certainly is no Wyrm, but as long as she is handled differently, she can take take a lot of indies. You have to stay away from indies that have the ability to ignore your awe as well as some of the beefier ones, but for the rest she works fine.

The main reason for this is that she can compensate her lack of ability in taking some indies with that perfectly awesome flying mobility. Her flying also ties in with her equipment and high awe when it comes to explaining her actual combat ability. The Flamberge actually suits her very well as it makes her a pretty decent killing machine while giving her enough defence to have a reliable second attempt at stopping damage, should her awe fail to a lucky roll. With a base 13 strength (you might want to include that in your guide) the 13 AP damage from the flamberge is exactly what she needs and the 4/2 in attack/defence means that she hits and kills one time per round while having an impressive 15 defense. The last makes her rather hard to hit and after about 2 stars of experience, which she attains very quickly, she is practically impossible to hit for most indies even aside from awe.

Apart from giving her excellent fleeing options if really bad luck should be in the cards, her flying also helps dealing with archers. Nothing can prevent her from just flying up to the indie archers and start killing. This will make a lot of archers unwilling to use their ranged attack and they also keep a good number of more beefy infantry away from the Virtue.

In conclusion I find the Virtue a decent expander from turn two. Mostly she will take a province each turn for the first year, but if bad luck with indie placement prevents it, that usually only means a province or possibly two less the first year.