I love High Men as well. But it's less for the Paladins (which I agree are the best nonmagical melee troops) and more for the Magicians.

Unlike every other race with magic users, High Men magicians have six figures per unit. That means their attack strength and hit points are 50% higher than standard 4-figure units.

Part of the problem is that Paladins are great when on the offensive, but get in each other's way when garrisoned behind a castle wall. They can't fly and lack a ranged attack, so most of them are sitting ducks while waiting to be deployed. I find that a mix of 6 magicians to 3 paladins seems to work the best

Like you, I prefer to use my heroes offensively. They gain XP much quicker that way, and are soon strong enough to attack enemy wizards directly if need be. I've never regretted not having Regeneration, since I almost never lose a hero during a battle. (If I didn't win, I replay it; and if I can't win, I wait until later in the game if at all possible )

And part of the advantage of the Runemaster/Artificer combo is that if I do lose a hero, I can already have a spare set of armor and weapons lying around, since I'd be crafting them for the mana anyway.

One neat trick to get your heroes and troops anywhere in the worlds is to use the Sorcery spell Word of Recall. Unlike Recall Hero (which only works on heroes, and only during battle) you can move any unit to wherever your summoning circle happens to be. If one of your cities is about to be attacked, you can garrison extra troops there, or even bring in a hero or two. You can even circumvent Planar Seal with this trick, provided you have at least one city on each plane.

When I first played the game, I quickly learned that paladins are great and used them a lot. Later on I tried different races and also different wizard combos.
Nowadays I like to play with halflings. You can get slingers very fast and they are great units. I try to get a city with mithril as soon as possible and also try to get to Myrror quickly. Adamantium is even better, but it will take a while until you can produce slingers on Myrror.
Slingers with Adamantium bonus, warlord bonus, and a couple of enchantments are unbelievable. They can take down dragons with a few shots.
Accompanied by few strong heroes, they are unstoppable.

Alchemy works well with Halflings, since you get the weapon bonus and you can convert mana to gold and vice versa, which comes in handy because Halflings are a bit of expensive at the beginning. They need so much food. ;-)

I like earth lore too, it supports fast expansion and allows to find adamantium. It also is helpful when using planeshift to get units to Myrror.

I'm a fan of paladins too, but you're really limiting yourself. There's no good reason as far as I can see.

Try playing Trolls with Death Magic and Alchemist. You can produce War Trolls and cast Black Channels on them which makes them undead. They only cost 1 mana per turn to upkeep and they regenerate, so unless you lose the entire battle you lose none of them even if they get killed. Also they keep any experience they've earned before you make them undead, so you can make Elite Undead War Trolls, or even better. Alchemist gives them magic weapons even without mithril or adamantium (which trolls can't use anyway, so you can ignore it).

Disregard...I reread your post and I see the info I needed. Thx

NP. I'm guessing it was the part about fractional skill points not being wasted? (And did you also note EvilLoynis' correction to the formula for those who have the Archmage skill?)

Actually I missed the bit about Legendary heroes boosting Fame when outside the capital. I am starting to try and incorporate a tactic of retiring unnecessary heroes in the late game and replacing them with Legendary heroes and/or champs, just to boost my final score.

Edit: Well, that worked. In the late game I dismissed B'Shan and with two spots open summoned Spyder and Sir Harold. Both had Super Legendary and I cast Heroism on both. Right before the end each was giving me +18 and I had my highest score ever.

One note about spell skill: There is a hard limit on increasing your casting skill. You can only increase your casting skill by 2 points each turn (the formula has already been stated in the thread). Any extra power that you dump into the Skill slider is wasted. This isn't an issue early game, since it is hard to get [4x + 2] (where x = your current skill) to put into the slider at all. Mostly it becomes an issue late game, when you've got a lot of power. More so if you haven't been pumping your skill all along.

As I understand it, Archmage is still limited by this hard cap, giving you more power to put elsewhere.

I don't know if Insecticide has done anything about this.

Edit: I just tested this last night, and I was wrong. There does not seem to be a hard cap on how much spell skill you can get in one turn; I was able to add more than 2 points to my skill both with Archmage and without it by pumping enough power into the "Skill" slider. This is using 1.31 (the version GOG sells).