Usually I lurk these kinds of old school game forums, but man, this thread got me into spending a lot of time theorizing about LOMSE again, like I used to do. Thanks for the nostalgia, I'll share some of my thoughts too:
So I was thinking about ideal army compositions and all that min-maxing stuff OCD people like me love to do.
My younger self liked to just do "as many legendaries and big stats as possible, and call it a day". While that's probably a pretty unbeatable army, I find it's more fun to think about the everyday normal units you can mass produce than spending a extreme amount of time collecting powerful uniques to get one ultimate army at a time where the game was practically over and won anyways due to said collecting process.
So right now I like to think about mass-producible army compositions that can be useful in mid-game as well.
One concept I've thought about recently was having three gnome magicians grouped with javelineers and knights(later level 6 ones).
The basic synergistic idea was that you'd have units that do incredibly well within short ranges combined with the Sleep Sands spell. So you'd immobilize their whole army with sleep sands and then position your units in short range. Then you'd start waking up and focus firing individual dangerous enemy units with the javelineers until the sleep sand wears off and then they don't stand a chance. It's short range which javelineers and knights are pretty much unbeatable at and they can't flee very easily because it's short range combat.
The knights are the best melee military units in the game and the javelineers have this unprecedented ability to rapidly kill anything within range with excellent throw rate and lethal spears.
The second synergistic idea this army is based upon only works on the standard map of Urak. In the standard map the Earth faith is positioned right next to Death and Order. So you'd start with a gnome magician, do your thing, then liberate the Order great temple. You'd be training your mage tower and start researching up to the sleep sand spell, meanwhile your other two champions are training knights and building up the Earth-Death border town to the east of the Earth capital to include a good Death thieves guild.
Once you can start pumping out level 2 javelineers and knights and some gnomes with the sleep sand spell, you can rapidly make yourself known across Urak by steamrolling inferior army compositions.