My 1st Rise of the Republic campaign. Iolei or Tarchuna? DEI or Vanilla?

[Il-Khan of Persia]

So this will be a casual campaign for me. Usually I'm either going for full map completion or historical borders to what that faction was at the time. For this campaign I don't care and it will just be going with the flow. I have two factions I'm looking into playing as and whichever I play first, I'll play the other second. Problem is, I've heard this DLC is quite difficult compared to the rest, and want your opinion on which to play first.

Iolei - I've heard a lot of interesting things about this faction. A bronze age styled faction with interesting units like the Nuragic Runners/ Heavy Nuragic Runners and their gloves. Also, when will I ever (get the chance to) play a Sardinian faction again? It has a really interesting start and I think I'd enjoy playing them a lot.

Tarchuna - So I have a rule: I never play as Romans... with the exceptions of playing as the Eastern Roman/ Byzantine Empire. In a campaign, you will never catch me playing as a Roman faction in R2 (except maybe Palmyra and Gallic Rome in Empire Divided, not sure on that yet) or as the Western Roman Empire in Attila. Why? I personally really don't like ancient Rome, and always play as it's enemies or the Greek Romans in the east that are Orthodox with more middle eastern styled units. Because of that, I would enjoy playing a campaign as the Etruscans and wipe Rome from the face of the earth.

Although I really enjoy DEI, given how RotR is supposedly much harder, I wasn't sure if I should do a vanilla campaign first and suffer through the bad unit cards, no population, etc.

No stress campaign, just looking to have a fun, chill time playing as either faction with DEI or Vanilla.

[IGX]

Always play the Vanilla first and use the mods afterward to enhance the game experience.

Iolei - You need an army made largely of Iolei slingers/archers and use feint retreat to outrun, surround and destroy Cathaginian units. They sometimes use cavalry so make sure you wipe them out first before using missiles to destroy their javelinmen and then their slow infantry.
Focus on Carthage first and move onto Sicily and then mainland Italy.

Tarchuna - Your personal vendetta against ancient Rome is on your own bias but in terms of the Etruscans its better to focus on livestock instead of industry as the there are too many drawbacks to upgrading industry while you can make just as much money through livestock and keep food reserves ridiculously high.