I think it really depends on your game style. I like Minos due to the fact that your basic units become quite amazing midgame & the Kings are just plain kickass, ad the bonuses & it's game over once you get them flowing.

As a strategic player , I've always liked Fey. Free gold AND crystal. What can you say? If you can't win with that , you simply can't win. They however are a bit weak early to midgame.

Plaguelords are fun too. The things I like about minos are taken upo a notch with all those sick upgrades. ;)
Pun intended.

I LIKE SWARM. <333

Everybody knows the minotaurs are best! Other than that I also like the Dark Dwarves and the Empire, but all races are fun and awesome. The lore in this game is great, I love it! HAHA

Heh i like this guy. Oddly enough, im ALWAYS Dwarf... But i find the Dwarves in this game, while amazing, are so slow moving and slow to build that i get bored. Dark Dwarves are entertaining though. But while i think Undead are the best, i kind of like playing Orc for some reason... People say 'fey' are the underdog? Hell, nobody else here has chosen Orcs... Its kind of a pity that Heroes are so great and yet ruin the game unless you deliberately stop leveling them, i think after 50 it just ruins it.

Minotaur Healer, with Minotaurs.

If there's one issue with Animal healing, it's that it's defensive by default-you're not guaranteed wild animals on the map to help you, and Sheep are slow. So bring your own healing. Elcor's Aura means you don't need as high of a casting skill to heal for good amounts, so you can eventually wade in there, carefully. +Speed from Invigorate is nice.

By far, the minotaurs.

For me, a assassin hero with a bunch of shamans can make a HUGE difference on the battlefield.

And we yet have their ability to heal themselves by eating animals.

Minotaurs are also by far my favorite. :)
It's hard to pick only three, Fey would be number 2 and maybe Orcs or High Elves for number 3.

(WLBC 2)

Dark Elf Summoner

Summoners as a profession are amazing, their basic summon the Quasit is not just a builder but a very competent node raider and fighter. Dark Elf heros can also get the racial ability "Dark Rituals", which boosts your casting ability for summoning very cheaply. With a summoning circle, summoning mastery and some points into intelligence/magery, can spawn 18-24 elite Quasits at about 10th level summoner which can swarm and kill heros, wipe out node clusters and even kill 1-2 towers.

I use her with Dark Elves or Undead

Undead have very strong early-game aggression and can increase resource output using zombies, I found them great for grinding those early levels. Skeletons, while absolute chaff in combat, are quick marchers and their ability to morph on the fly gives the undead the versatility to raid without committing resources, then morph to respond to threats opportunistically. Combined with the summoner's quasits, you easily sieze map control in a 1v1 without needing to upgrade past tier 2 fortress.

Dark Elves are a bit weaker in the early game. Their skeletons can't morph, but they're decent enough against towers. Spiders seem to be more effective in melee. Spider queens are great for shutting down tough infantry rushes at tier 2.
Dark Elves easily outmatch most races at tier 3 fortress with their sorcerers however - upgrade them with black bolt and you've got your doom squad with 6 or more, and their pillar of fire spell melts all but the toughest units. I love sorcerers so much I always keep 2 of them in my retinue for when I feel like playing Undead. . Ancient wisps are extremely necessary for getting the sorcerer rush going on higher difficulties, I've found. The Dark Elf economy doesn't fully come online until 3rd tier with their thralls. At this stage, mass skeletons become very viable just to take the fire off of your sorcerors, mixing some dark infantry in can also make the infantry blob more effective in melee, especially against dwarfs (all t1 elven infantry do triple damage vs dwarfs)

Also love my Barbarian Druid, with his summoned unicorns for healing, supporting hordes of barbarians at tier 3 with spear of ank, works similarly to the dark elf sorcerors but much cheaper and more spamable.

In wbc1, I am afraid that humans are the best, being the only race without senseless class restrictions (and the only option in the campaign).

In wbc2 and 3, regardless of what I like to play, daemon heroes are probably the best. The have access to the best school of magic: pyromancy (in wbc1 and 2 also terribly OP), they have high starting strength (the best stat in 1&2 and the worst in 3), they gain mana from souls. In 3, they have ferocity (the essential ability for fighting) as a race, meaning a daemon warrior can dominate the field from level 1 (starting fero=6, plus a regen combo bonus, indifferent to me) and a mage may sometimes stay alive in battle, too. Fero and Pyro are true to Minotaurs, of course, although in a lesser degree. I'd suggest the Ranger class for Minotaurs (among other useful monster-buffing skills, giving that sorry excuse of a fighter that ranger is, the essential ferocity that it lacked, and to the minotaur the speed to hunt sheep). Summoning for daemons is also a nice combo for obvious reasons (unless you have the patch), and since Summoner is a lousy class (Arcane is useless to summoning and Gate skill fpr xp-ing daemons is tragically nerfed), if you are not patient enough for its Arcane+Pyromancy enhancements in, like, L50, I'd suggest an Archmage or a Daemonslayer (for the irony of it).
They are not so fun as a race to play, though: too large base, slow development, nothing to put in towers, hard-to-like creatures until you can build summoners. Most of all I hate imps, for they cost much needed crystals and need too much micromanagement to stf away of enemy towers.
That said, all Elven heroes, along with Priests and Elementalists, having the Lore skill, have a heavy advantage in spellcasting.
(in wbc3, mana is a pain, and intelligence, the other way to get mana, is, after strength, the second worst stat to spend points on, regardless of hero class: 3 mana per point, 1 mana regen per 10, not good enough)
So, I think that a High Elven Warrior (ferocious, healing, high mana due to lore) may be the most effective class existing.
In wbc3 I've played all heroes and all races, to the point that I discovered a bug crashing the game after you store >100 heroes in the file, (not fixed in the unofficial mod, of course) so I had to fix it myself, manually hiding the heroes in the savefile.
I usually play a hybrid-speed-run strategy in every stage of the campaign, meaning, weaken them with your retinue troops and finish them off with what you've built in the meanwhile. Therefore, I hardly ever build titans or dragons in-time.
To this means, surprisingly, Empire is what brings me the most fun. By gambling random units it's the only one that isn't boring in early stages (although every race's units up to level 2 are incompetent for my rushing-style of play, getting them randomly somehow makes it fun; and sometimes you get an unexpected Treant, a Sorcerer, an Assassin, or a Knight Lord much faster than in their original houses).
But I also like the Fey, the High Elves and the Undead for reasons that other posts have analysed better than I could.

Here's some other race/class combinations that have worked fine for me in wbc3:
(Usually you finish the campaign before reaching L30, so having early access to skills is important to me)
* Fey Assassin (illusion + assassin + shadow strength make a deadly combo)
* Fey Elementalist (many-school combos, notably giving a fire attack to the ultra fast spriggans)
* Orc Elementalist (destroys buildings with pyro and demolition, repairs them with rune magic).
* Dark Elf Deamonslayer (a fighter with Lore and summoning from L1)
* Dark Elf Paladin (assassinate and stay alive)
* Dwarf Archmage (practically a merchant class for very, very fast building rather than a battle mage)
* High Elf Archmage (the healing and Lore that the Archmage was missing)
* Dwarf Healer (speed up, cure is what you'll cast 99% of the times. Elcor's aura is OP in wbc3, they forgot to fix it in the mod)
* Empire Priest (For divination and summoning mages; I also liked the idea of a Sage, additionally xp-ing mages, but it struggles with mana in early levels and it's probably the weakest hero I've ever made)
* High/Wood/Dark Elf Deathknight (a fighter that can summon zombies for mines. Dark Elf also has late summoning, so there may be better options)
* Dark Dwarf Alchemist (a tinker could do, too, but I want more mana and regen)
* An Empire/Ssrathi Tinker (bonus metal, trading resources that the Ssrathi are lacking)
...