I'm sort of attempting to play MM1, but I'm kind of lost on what to do at the beginning. I haven't bothered looking for quests yet - random encounters in Sorpigal alone are kicking my ass.
I guess my first question is, is this party any good?
AGUECHEEK
M NEUT H-ORC KNIGHT
INT=12
MGT=14
PER=13
END=14
SPD=14
ACY=8
LUC=6
ROLAND
M GOOD HUMAN PALADIN
INT=9
MGT=15
PER=13
END=17
SPD=13
ACY=12
LUC=12
AGILAZ
M GOOD HUMAN ARCHER
INT=13
MGT=12
PER=12
END=14
SPD=13
ACY=14
LUC=7
ISABELLA
F GOOD HUMAN CLERIC
INT=14
MGT=9
PER=14
END=15
SPD=15
ACY=10
LUC=14
PROSPERO
M GOOD HUMAN SORCERER
INT=14
MGT=11
PER=5
END=13
SPD=13
ACY=14
LUC=8
WIGGINS
M NEUT HUMAN ROBBER
INT=16
MGT=5
PER=10
END=13
SPD=13
ACY=14
LUC=15
After that, what does one do to start the game? I see these as my options:
* Get in random fights in Sorpigal, use money to buy better stuff
* Get in fixed encounters in Sorpigal, use money to buy better stuff
* Explore Sorpigal dungeon
* Explore overland
Which of these things should you start by doing? And when is it time to move on from that, and to what?
And I'm assuming that it's one of the first two things to start with. If that's so, then how does a noob survive? What monsters make good LVL1 party prey, and what do I run from? If someone goes down in battle, should I keep going, or reset and reload from the Inn? After a single victory, what then? Heal up, return to the Inn, or look for more trouble until reaching a certain quota?

Your party should be good enough to succeed, but if you rellly want to min/max it you could do with a little higher might and endurance on your knight, higher personality on your paladin, higher intelligence and might on your archer, higher personality on your cleric and higher intelligence on your sorcerer, but you're only down a point or 2 from the "recommended".
Okay, so at the start, regardless of your party, you are going to die, a lot. At the start, you should be able to kill many of the things you come up against, except sprites, if you encounter sprites, RUN.
You should probably rest after every fight, make sure to cast leather skin with your sorcerer and go back to the inn often to minimise the impact of your inevitable deaths. Search the bodies after each fight and use your sorcerer to detect if there is any traps on the chest or bag, if you are weak and there is a trap you are better off resting before opening it, or perhaps better off just leaving it alone.
Also, remember, in battles use spells like sleep in order to make the enemy less effective so they don't destroy you.
Random encounters scale, so you don't really have to stay in Sorpigal to start, although set encounters aren't so forgiving. Also, make sure to keep note of everything anyone says or does or is written anywhere, because it will most likely be useful somewhere.
Here's what I do when starting off:
Level 1-explore Sorpigal
Level 2-explore below Sorpigal
Level3+-go around to anywhere I have a reason to go, talk to bartenders see what they say, complete quests, etc.
Hope that helps. It is a fun game once you get passed the first little bit, and even the beginning is fun in it's own way.

I am going to be very blunt about this simply to make my point.
first off, you are going to want an equal amount of Male/female characters because at certain points in the game characters with a certain gender will get a nasty debuff in certain areas. To make these areas more forgiving its better to have an equal split of males/females
Next, you want 2 evils, 2 goods, and 2 neutrals for the same reasons you want an equal amount of males/females. Some creatures will get bonus damage against certain alignments and certain gear requires a certain alignment
Both of these ARE NOT required though HEAVILY recommended.
Race is insignificant from what I can see. I'd recommend staying with all humans though, it makes things simpler.
Moving onto the stats... For starters I personally wouldn't take any rolls with values LESS than 12. Next Speed and Accuracy should ALWAYS be 16 or higher on every character, No exceptions. Speed determines who goes first in a battle. It's always good to have your characters go first. Accuracy affects melee/ranged attacks. I think it also affects spells, but even if it doesn't; there are going to be SEVERAL encounters where you are in areas where spells cannot be cast and your casters NEED to join the melee in the fight.
Here are some other additional requirements I had when creating characters:
Knight: Might 18
Paladin: Personality/Endurance/Might 14+
Archer: Intelligence 14+, Accuracy 18
Robber: Luck 18
Cleric: Personality/Might 16+
Sorcerer: Intelligence 18
Yes it can take a while to get these types of rolls, but it's far from impossible.
You did make the very wise choice of having one of every class. There are too many reasons why this is a good idea in MM1 so we'll just leave it at that.
The first thing you should do is start mapping out the town and anywhere you go. You don't have to fully map every area before you leave, but at least keep track of where you go and what you see. DO NOT, I REPEAT DO NOT RELY SOLELY ON PRE-MADE MAPS! There lots of subtle details they fail to mention or show that will drive you nuts. Bust out the colored pencils and graph paper before you start playing!
Next I'd recommend carefully exploring the town of Sorpigal and it's basement. I wouldn't leave until everyone in your party is level 3 or higher. Note that half the classes take longer to level up than the other half. Use the first gold you get to buy more food. Then save it up for training(aprox 100 gold per character, the characters that need more exp to level cost more to level) Getting level 2 will do wonders for your survival abilities. After you hit level two then you can begin to worry about getting new gear for your characters. Ironically enough you can find some pretty good stuff on monsters.
NOTE: You will NOT receive money by default just for killing a group of monsters. You have to search the area once you kill monster to look for loot chests/bags. Always use a robber to try and search/disarm these caches. Also, make sure everyone has at least 10% of their maximum health because if a trap DOES go off and a party member is unconscious(or has very low HP) they WILL DIE! Resurrections from temples are very pricey and clerics don't get the spell for a while.
The same precautions for loot caches dropped by monsters also applies to doors. Also note that traps can give your party members very nasty status effects such as blind/paralyze/sleep/poison.
When in battle keep tabs as to who is on the front line. This can be detonated by the + by their number or the monster's letter.
Last piece of advice I can think of at the moment is to SAVE before leveling up. You do not get a static ammount of HP when you level. You can reload and retrain to get better HP rolls when getting trained to level up
I hope I didn't sound too brutal/rude but I don't like sugar coating things like this!

May be brutal, but also unnecessary, you can complete the game with any party make up, although one of each class helps a lot, his party is fine for completing the game. I would have to go against having 2 people from every alignment for the simple reason that certain spells like heroism only work on like-aligned characters.
The game is designed to have you die repeatedly in order to figure out what it is you are actually doing, you don't need perfect characters, in fact it can be more entertaining without them. make good use of status spells and you should be fine regardless of your characters initial stats, they won't actually make a difference later in the game.
Gender can be changed in-game anyway, so it isn't like an imbalance between them is a big deal, in fact the biggest role gender plays probably makes an all-female team most beneficial, but still unnecessary.

I don't like to take chances I don't have to! True, he is probably fine, but certain spots may prove to be excessively difficult with the alignment issue. The stats certainly will not help. The setup I propose will make things a little easier. I am assuming he is probably not used to games from MM1's time when all games were brutally difficult when compared to modern games.
I did not know you can change the gender of characters... where do you pull that off?

I'm somewhat of a Wizardry veteran, having played and finished all of the DOS Wizardries at least once, including the notorious Wiz 4.
Other early RPGs on my resume are all of the DOS Ultimas and all of the 8-bit and 16-bit Final Fantasies. None of them are really comparable to Wizardry, and this is the first time I've ever played an M&M game of any kind (aside from Heroes of Might and Magic).
Yeah, I'm an OCD completionist that doesn't play a sequel without finishing the predecessors first. But I'd guess you'd have to be to not take one look at this game and scream "ahhh it's so primitive!"
Thanks for the tips so far, both of you. For the time being I'll stick with the stats I've got, but if it gets too frustrating, I'll just boost them a bit through hex edit. I figure if it's possible to achieve such min/maxing through sheer patience, I'd just as soon skip the hours of re-rolling part.
I've been playing a bit now, and one thing I realized early on is that the clubs don't come equipped. I won my first battle shortly after equipping them. I can survive battles in Sorpigal most of the time, though the dungeon is full of nasty death, and I haven't left Sorpigal yet.
Regarding noob gear, have I got the right idea here?
Knight - Short Sword, Small Shield, Leather Armor, with intent to buy Chain Mail later
Paladin - Same
Archer - Staff, Longbow (found in an iron chest), Padded Armor, with intent to buy Chain Mail later
Cleric - Staff, Padded Armor, with intent to buy Chain Mail later
Sorcerer - Staff, Padded Armor
Robber - Short Sword, Crossbow, Padded Armor, with intent to buy Ring Mail later

You can change genders at a well under Portsmith.

People have had some good advice, but also some that's not really necessary.
I just finished the game, and my characters were half male / half female, mix of good and neutral with one evil. What I found was that the game was certainly beatable with my party, but actually having everyone be the same alignment was beneficial. Changing alignment turns out to be fairly easy (you'll see), so don't worry about alignment-specific items. Your party will be fine here though; like I said, I didn't really have trouble finishing the game.
Also, speaking of items, the game doesn't tell you whether items you find in your adventuring are better than the items you have. I found this annoying, so checking out item stats was the one thing that I used the cluebook for. It does contain minor spoilers, but I felt it was worth it, as there's quite a lot of items that aren't for sale anywhere so you can't check the price to see how good they are.
I re-rolled my characters to have higher stats than yours, but as the game goes on the base stats become less important. Keep in mind that if things get hard, you can always keep leveling / exploring other areas. If you find tough areas, explore somewhere else instead! You'll often find useful things. If you DO want to re-roll stats, though, my suggestion is high endurance and high speed for everyone. Speed is great not only for acting faster in combat, but it also raises your AC. A fast sorceror is especially important, because it means he can fire off spells before any enemies act. In the early game, getting off a sleep spell at the start can make combat much easier.
One last word of advice: I didn't actually do this, but after I'd started the game I found out that you can take the equipment off of the pre-made party. Just load the game up with a mix of the pre-made characters and the characters you created, then transfer money, food, and equipment to your guys, repeat as necessary. That can help a lot in the early game. The very beginning is a bit of a grind if you don't do this. Fortunately, the rest of the game I found to be much less of a grind in that there was always some other area I could explore while I was gaining experience.
Overall I was quite impressed with the game considering its age. Have fun!

I've got a mapping question. Is there any way to see which walls are real and which are false, without having to bump into every single one of them? Outdoor areas seem to have a lot of false walls, and checking each and every one is going to get annoying.

Bumping into them is pretty much the only way, although outside, the non-dense trees are generally passable and merely vision obstructing.

Sadly there is not to my knowledge. To make matters worse there are several locations outside where walls that look like they are not passable are infact "passable". The swamps/pinetree walls are almost always passable. The other types, not so much
What I do is... You know what, since I am nice I will give you a freebie! Below is my map of outside A-2
http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v288/XaviarCraig/A2.jpg
I know the quality isnt good(my scanner is crap and my shitty drawing doesnt help!) but the arrows I drew should stand out. Those arrows represent how you can move through walls that look like they normally cannot be passed through. Btw, the things that look like Greek Phi's mean there are nasty encounters on those squares!

Ok, all my characters are level 4 now. Equipment is like this:
Knight:
Staff +1
Chain Mail +1
Paladin:
Flamberge
Chain Mail
Archer:
Bardiche
Short Bow +1
Chain Mail
Cleric:
Staff
Chain Mail
Sorcerer:
Staff
Padded Armor
Robber:
Short Sword
Crossbow
Ring Mail
I can take on anything in Sorpigal and Sorpigal Dungeon. I've got the Vellum Scroll, and am tasked to bring it to Erliquin.
I can take on some of the baddies in C-2, but some, like Hippogrifs, Centaurs, and locust plagues, are potentially lethal. Troglodites are inclined to slime me, and there doesn't seem to be any way to cure poison at this stage of the game. Passage to the west is blocked by statues that it seems can only be harmed by magic (last time I tried only my archer, cleric, and sorcerer could do anything at all, and I got murdered). I went to the area to the north one time, and almost immediately got ambushed by nigh-invincible trolls. I went into the Crazed Wizard's Cave one time, and I don't really remember what happened, but it wasn't pretty, and I fear to set foot in again. And I haven't even tried exploring south or east yet.
So, what's recommended next? Grind for EXP in C-2 some more? Explore somewhere else? Try to find some better weapons? Fight more efficiently? Get better characters?

... or you can also download all of them at
http://www.mightandmagicgrove.com/mm1/mm1.htm
Raging Chaos, I'm only level 5 in my game, will my paladin and archer also get extra attacks like the Knight will?
And at what level? The manual doesn't explain this
Actually I have yet to find a good, extensive guide to MM1 and MM2's combat and level up game mechanics.

My advice is to avoid the crazed wizard's cave for now (in fact, don't try to go east at all, there's some tough areas over there). It's not a bad idea to head for Erliquin. Going north to C-1 you will not find any harder than C-2, although there are a few tough spots (but those should be fairly easy to figure out). From there you can head west, and you should be able to find Erliquin without too much trouble. As a general rule, many outdoor areas may be reasonably safe for the most part but have specific spots that are quite dangerous. So don't give up on an area just because of one tough fight. If ALL the fights are tough, it might be time to explore somewhere else.
By the way, there are a few enemies like those statues, which seem to resist attacks. It took me a little while to figure out that they can actually be harmed by magical weapons (i.e. any weapon with a + after it). For example, your knight's Staff +1 could actually damage the statues. It's probably a good idea to avoid them for now until most or all of your characters have magical weapons. It's also important to realize that for this reason, sometimes weak, magical weapons are better than basic, strong ones.

Since I love exploring/mapping the world in MM1, I've only done like 4 quests total, but I've fully explored the outside world and a handful of dungeons. My characters are already level 9! They would be higher but in the game I get alittle too reckless often and die horribly! Red Dragons are brutally strong! If you see them, run like hell!