Interesting approach, but for some reason, it didn't work for me. I attacked the castle in the 4th week. Now, everything is quite tedious – they keep coming from all sides; it's been almost 3 months.
In general, you seem to have your own approach to the walkthrough.
I tried to eliminate heroes during that period so they wouldn't escape. This way, I got a lot of artifacts and increased my stats. As far as I understand, some enemy heroes, if they escaped, wouldn't be "re-bought" by the enemy, so, for example, if a hero escaped using a special ability against devils, I wouldn't get anything. However, other heroes can be re-bought (for example, Sandro and Ignat), which allows you to re-learn Blind from Sandro and, in the case of Ignat, get a highly leveled-up hero.
You can get the Shackles in the dungeon from Octavia, but you need to get there earlier, which is theoretically possible, but in practice, I did it with a delay.
I hope to defeat the final boss soon and post a report.