European War 6 Barclay

Lol him karl and massena make the militia around them hit for like 100+ damage, which is really amusing. But agreed.

He’s Massena without Formation Master, which means that he’s
Massena.

Anyway, aura is overrated imo, particularily for inf and art. Infantry is worthless in Crimean war and outclassed by cav in every way anywhere else. Art isn’t spammable and isn’t even that great in campaign because they can still only attack once per turn. And cav need to get to places. Generic units are also pretty weak even with auras. Cav gets away with it because unlike for art and inf, the best stand-alone cav gens are the Aura ones. Massena, Barclay, Alexander and Mahmud lacks or have lousy terrain skills. The only two who are good are Karl, who has forest, (but is not at the top because he doesn’t have Assault) and Napoleon, who gets away with enormous stats. Lannes, Bismarck and Scharnhorst are better for my playstyle.

That’s not to say that the aura is a bad skill, in fact, it’s great, but I pretty much just view it as a 2nd Precision strike/Assault/Salvo. Which is strong, but not stronger than plain at such high attack values.

I still have generals for the other unit types, but that’s more for the rare instances where it is ABSOLUTELY unfeasible to use cav.

Fortunately, you do have great replacements for the auras in Infantry and Artillery.

On Infantry, the best out of them are Lannes, Garibaldi and Bismarck. Lannes is a great price performer, Garibaldi is a great sieger and Bismarck is a very powerful jack-of-all-trades.  The only real problem  that you have here is farming for Bismarck's enormous price, and maybe completing Lannes's missions. Fortunately, those aren’t performance problems, but rather availability problems. If you can farm for Bismarck, you’re good. 

As for Artillery, you thankfully do have 3 great non-auras: John, Scharnhorst and Sophia. The only problem of Sophia is that her palace ability is quite useful, and buying her means that you will have to lose her ability. Also, if you are a bad micromanager, or can’t stand to deliberately look for mountain-jungle titles, John will lose much of his output, but fortunately he has Salvo and Storm Fortifications. His later missions, especially his sixth, are also kinda difficult. So, if you can deal with lacking Sophia's ability and the fact that John is kinda hard to use and that his later missions are kinda hard, you have 3 great Artillery generals that replace the 3 Artillery Auras.

Dabrowski, Blucher and Murat, like you said, are pretty much non-replaceable because they also happen to be the best in their class. Davout, Lan and Paget are somewhat worse than the 3 auras. Lan is the best, but the other two have a reliance on Tactics Master, and Davout has a mostly useless terrain bonus.

I think we can agree that there is no admiral team that can replace Nelson, Sakurako and Treville. Victoria is great, Hood is good, Jones is meh.

Like I wrote before, I’m NEVER dropping my Auras, however.

Formation Master is honestly not that great since infantry just has low base attack. 

Not really, I find that Massena crits for 140-160, and can occasionally do 200+ if he has some auras. Ney has much higher base damage than Massena has and gets +25% damage vs most infantry, and he has a crit skill. He crits for ~210 at the best of times, much higher when he has some auras, Guess what? Murat and Blucher can crit for 260 without help, and I've seen them (just recently even) deal 330 with some help. They don't have crit skills, they just crit that hard because their base attack is HUGE. Higher base damage is superior to crit damage.

Oh, and it also scales horribly. +1% crit damage for each level. I don't know the exact numbers, but say that the crit chance is 30%, and the base crit damage multiplier is 1.3, that's a 0.3% average damage increase per level, woohoo.