I'm fond of nomad horsebowmen. They're available reasonably early on, rather cheap, they don't slow down your heroes and they have a ranged attack.

In my first game (okay, it was on an easy difficulty) I ran over the entire continent with Serena and two units of horsebowmen, gradually increasing the doomstack to four units of HBM and four heroes (three of which also have ranged attacks, plus Baghtru to handle melee units that manage to live long enough to reach my units).

All my spearmen, swordsmen, pikemen, etc. got slaugtered by ghouls and other random trash monsters, but my doomstack of heroes and horsebowmen have trampled everything they met without any loss ever.

Now I gotta try a new game in a less noob-friendly mode; I'm sure I'll have more incentive to build more expensive units...

You have correctly identified Horsebowmen as a great unit. They have the exact same stats as High Men Cavalry, but instead of First Strike they get a ranged attack. And it's a decent ranged attack. The Horsebows charge until they are within 2 squares of the enemy (this is maximum power distance) and fire. On turns afterwards, they run away until they establish this 2 square distance again, and fire. (This is actually pretty close to what Mongol horsebowmen did, lol!) When they run out of arrows, they fight as normal cavalry, they still have all their swords and 3 hearts per figure.

The Orcs can build every structure and unit in the game.

In fairness, that's because they need to. ;)

It's been pointed out before, but bears repeating: it's kind of odd, and rather charming, that the devs decided that orcs (rather than High Men) should be the baseline average humans of the game.

Well, I found one use for war bears and fire giants: one of each can give a stack of hell hounds path finding!

I'm pleasantly surprised at just how fast barbarians are able to spread. This has a nice side effect of giving me a good tax base. Should be interesting to see how they fare in battle against nomads and high elves; getting about time to start pushing on the enemy wizards, as soon as I can get some troop production running.

Barbarians: Fast to grow, pretty fast to spread, and Berserkers are terrifying in battle. However, they are so SLOW moving around the world map. Oi!

On the up side, just like Gnolls and Lizardmen, you can finish out a town's buildings, then just start churning out those units. Takes longer to get everything, but Berserkers are pretty crazy in battle.

That reminds me of Beastmen. Nobody ever talks about playing Beastmen, so I tried it a couple of times: slow too, except for one flying unit which is decent. The Minotaurs are quite good but slow as dirt and with only two figures per unit, which sometimes makes me nervous.

beastmen seem to have the best basic bowmen and priests, but probably overpriced compared to other races with increase HP/attack. i think only troll priests are more overpriced?

Some random thoughts in no particular order:

As a general rule, units with ranged attacks are more useful in groups than units with melee attacks. Longbows will massacre halberdiers in equal numbers, despite the fact that halberdiers have higher attack and defense numbers.

Melee units have more potential as unstoppable one unit armies than ranged units. Cast heroism on a barbarian cavalry unit and it can single-handedly conquer most neutral cities, they are particularly good against swordsmen. Try this with a longbow unit and the single longbow will usually die, running out of time and/or ammunition before the defenders are all dealt with by missile fire. Even lesser units like halberdiers can do this with enough add-ons like giant strength, stone skin, and holy armor. These spells do not benefit ranged units as much as melee units.

Longbow units only had the long range advantage in the initial release version of MoM. They were a little too good and later patches removed this advantage. The version GoG downloads is the final release patch and longbows do not have long range. Right click a longbow unit and check the ability list to verify this. The manual is wrong because it reflects the unpatched initial release. The range penalty is somewhat mitigated for longbows because they get +1 to hit like all high elf units, which helps offset range penalties.

Bonuses for mithril and adamantium only add to melee attack, not ranged. There is little point in searching out these special resources if you are going to rely on ranged units.

Resist elements is very, very helpful for defending against normal units with magic ranged attacks, such as shaman, priests, and magicians, and is also great against sprites.

I never build entire armies out of paladins. I very often slip a single paladin into a stack of magicians, giving them all +1 holy bonus.

I think in terms of slave cities. A slave city is a conquered city of a different race than your primary race. Some races make much better slaves than others. Some races make good economic slaves, with potential for high gold production, and to a lesser extent, food production. Some races make good military slaves, with excellent military units available. Some races make crappy slaves because they produce too many rebels, either because of a high basic rebellion rate or a lack of rebellion suppressing buildings. Orcs are great economic slaves but forget producing a decent military unit out of them. Halflings make great slaves in the early game, but the lack of higher end buildings limits late game potential. High elves are freaking awesome slaves, with high end buildings such as bank, animists guild and merchants guild, great early game cavalry and longbows, with magicians for end game, and extra mana just for breathing. Dark elves have obvious potential as slaves, but can be difficult to keep from rebelling.

Klackons are the most loathed race in the game because they make terrible slaves, and it is very difficult to control slave cities of other races if your main race is klackon.

If a slave city has a rebel problem, consider destroying any granary or farmers market present, to reduce growth until you get the rebels under control.

By far the most common units in my army are spearmen, most cities have a garrison of two, primarily to suppress unrest.

Barbarian berserkers are the deadliest normal melee unit in the game. One on one, they will easily destroy paladins, war trolls, or hammerhands. However, paladins have advantages that tend to make up for their lack of relative melee ability. Magic immunity is very helpful against a great number of opponents with magic attacks. And the holy bonus is nice when you stack paladins with lesser units.

My standard late game army typically consists of a nine unit stack with mostly magicians, with typically 2-3 supporting units, such as priests (for healing), a ranger (for pathfinding) a paladin (for holy bonus and melee backup), and possibly a hero. If I have dark elves available I of course use warlocks instead of magicians.

Wrong on two counts: 1) the bonus does help non-magic ranged attackers (so slingers and longbows get ranged help, while magicians do not), and it increases defense of the unit regardless of attack types. 2) Each mithral provides +1 power and each adamantium provides +2 power just for being in a city's radius, even if the city is only an outpost. This is equivalent to the power provided by a shrine or a temple, respectively, and it is essentially free.

-Yep, orcs are much better economists than fighters.
-Halfling cities can churn out slingers, which are strong even late game.
-High Elves are okay; they tend to have problems with growth and rebellion. I'd honestly rather have High Men almost every time, with longbows being the main exception.
-If you have a decent military power base, then Dark Elf rebellion almost doesn't matter, since the rebels still make that sweet, sweet +1 power per citizen. :D

I genuinely don't understand why you would do this for any city you plan to keep. Let the city keep growing: if you can't get the rebels under control later, then no big deal since rebels don't hurt anything (unlike in Civ). If you can get the rebels under control later (lowering tax rate, spells, garrison, fame, etc.) then you instantly have productive citizens without needing to wait for the city to grow. Those buildings don't cost very little maintenance, they can help your food production (for supporting more units), and if you sell them, then you need to rebuild them later when you do get the rebels under control. If your city is flat out going to be conquered, then you may take an extra point or two of fame hit. If you defend your city, but some population dies in the battle, then you'll be losing rebels instead of productive citizens (which is effectively zero loss at all for you).

Berserkers might take out hammerhands, but I'm not convinced they'll run roughshod over Paladins or War Trolls (especially War Trolls). If you control the berserkers while the computer controls the paladins or trolls, then sure, because you can take advantage of your unit's strengths while mitigating the enemy unit strengths. If you control the paladins or trolls, then you can completely nullify the berserker thrown weapons, which is a big part of what makes them so deadly. For that matter, hammerhands can probably negate the thrown weapons too, at least some of the time.

To go conquering, if I had a choice between a stack of paladins, or a stack of magicians/warlocks backed with one paladin, 9 out of 10 times I'll take the paladins. Much faster and more resilient overall. That's my personal preference, anyway.

I prefer to call them "partners in prosperity."

There's a Life spell called Stream of Life, and one of it's beneficial effects is the eradication of rebels in any city where you cast it. That makes a Life-based empire easy to rule, even with many different partners in prosperity.

That's one of the reasons I like pairing Dark Elves with Life.

I take it you never met flying, invisible, spell locked warships :)

I can safely safe the computer has never, ever thrown that at me. ;)

Also, I'm not sure that flying + invisibility + spell lock as a combo can count as early game support.

Playing through with Beastmen this time, 2x Chaos/Sorcery/Nature and Artificer + Runemaster + Myrran.

I like their racial unit bonus (+1 attack/hp/resist), but sadly they just doesn't seem as competitive as the other races of Myrror. Dark Elves get a lot of extra Power, Trolls regenerate, Draconians fly, and Dwarves have extra production and taxable gold. Overall, the Beastmen currently feel a lot like the Orcs of Myrror: while they can do pretty much anything, they don't excel in any particular area. Sadly, Draconians can do nearly everything Beastmen can do, and Draconians have better race relations to boot. The Draconians have been High Manning my Orcs!

I mostly end up comparing them to Draconians, perhaps because I conquered a nearby Draconian city early. The Beastmen will eventually be able to make a Mechanician's Guild, but they can't make a Merchant's Guild. It has been sort of nice being able to go "Meh, don't need to build next to the ocean", but I really miss knowing that a Merchant's Guild could be in the my city's future. For some reason, I don't seem to care as much about the Mech Guild, even though it is probably the better building.

Maybe after I get a few cities online producing the high end troops my opinion will change some. Didn't help that a unit of zombies hit one of my cities and steamrolled nearly everything in there (my one surviving unit beastman swordsman ended up being chased around the map until the battle ended). Every so often, zombies surprise me with how tough they can be. I just looked up the stats, and zombies have the same stats as recruit level Dwarf Halberdiers (except Resistance); no wonder they rolled my swords and spears. I'll have to remember that power comparison.

I did enjoy the early centaurs I produced, before they died taking out Ssa'ra. I've focused my fortress city on producing settlers (and the draconian city on producing swordsmen to defend my new cities), so we'll see what happens when I can move to unit production.

Serena signed on and has been more than earning her keep; she's definitely one of the more able heroes that can show up early. Adding several +3 move amulets to Jaer (found him in a dungeon) has greatly expanded my move options. The pair have been doing great against the low tier fantastic units they've been going up against so far; Jaer gets them to the next attack site (8 flying move per turn!), then both open fire while Serena tanks with her super-enspelled Plate Mail (add Healing as necessary). Continually breaking artifacts has been helping keep my mana high, which also keeps my gold high from not having to alchemize more mana.

Pretty much this.

I found them interesting, but there's nothing about Beastmen that makes me want to play them a second time. They don't have much of a "hook."

Getting Jaer solves the problem of their slowness though.

Jaer got sniped by an Ice Bolt awhile ago. Oh well. Aureus actually did pretty well for me before he died too.

I've summoned the 6 standard champions, and got some decent picks on most of them. Some wasted picks, but that's to be expected with that many rolls. Sadly, I can't really send them against the enemy wizards until the wizards are banished. There are simply too many max strength ice bolts, fire bolts, psionic blasts, cracks call, etc. flying around. Hard difficulty, and all of the enemy wizards have been established for awhile, so I can't just run them out of mana, either.

I'm still unimpressed with Beastmen; I still haven't gotten a fully built out city to start churning out units yet, but none of the options are particularly exciting. My dwarf city has been churning out Hammerhands for a long time, and my troll cities are starting to get close to War Trolls. The Draconian city isn't up to speed either, but I'm much more looking forward to when it is. Maybe I just need to slap down a Fighter's Guild, an Alchemist Guild, and start making some stuff to go fight.

I have been making extensive use of Earth Elementals to help defend my few Arcanus cities, and they are well worth the cost. Sure, they take damage from most normal units while engaging, but they have SO MUCH health, and they have a good chance of tromping right over multiple units before finally going down. They work better as summons than in nodes, because you can (usually) hold off summoning until enemy units are close enough to start engaging right away; the elemental does have a mobility issue. Stag beetles are pretty hardy, usually taking an Earth Elemental to nearly dead (or dead) per two of them. It is important to be the initiator as much as possible to avoid the fire breath damage.

Fire Elementals? Meh, kinda weak. Air Elementals? Overpriced. Earth Elementals? Yes, please!