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And the most powerful soldiers of High Men race isn't knights, instead paladins which you can only build after you cast 'Tree of Knowledge' spell...
And even 'WITH' paladins, clearing hard features is a hassle to be dealt with and for many of such you could try magicians which can take them out from range, and probably you would need to develop summoned army from your spells to be truly be able to match the power of the harder features, and in later game heroes/champions who are equipped with items/artifacts you create...
*edit*
Tree of Knowledge allows you to build Armorer's Guild and Fantastic Stables both of which allow for building of the top tier units in their respective races...
High tier monsters ("fantastic" units) are much stronger than almost all units built in cities ("normal" units). Dragons eat horses.
Start by learning to recognize what different units do and how hard they are to damage. Yes, this will involve getting a lot of units eaten. For Science!
Check your units' expected damage (swords times to-hit chance) versus your targets' expected block (shields times to-defend chance). If these are the same, expect to do maybe 1 damage per figure per attack. If the block is higher, expect to do no damage.
A lot of fantastic units have abilities that change how combat happens. Weapon Immunity, First Strike, Breath attacks, and Gaze attacks will give you the most unpleasant surprises. Magical weapons (Alchemist's Guild) fixes Weapon Immunity, high resistance helps against Gazes, and making sure your unit does the attacking prevents First Strike and Breath attacks from working.
Game is called "Master of Magic" for reasons. This is the world where magic rules. Fantastic creatures like dragons, demons et cetera, may destroy entire armies of mortal soldiers with easy.
So. If you want to survive in this world, you need to base your strategy all around magic. See carefully, what spells do you have and what effects they are doing. Summon creatures, most of summons are much more powerful than common soldiers. Enhance your units with buffs. Muster some spearmen and throw them into nodes and lairs. Yes, spearmen will die but you will have a chance to look at defenders, check their abilities, strengths and weaknesses. Then plan your attack. What spells do you have and how you may counter expected enemies, this is the question.
High Men is a great faction to play, they have excellent paladins and priests, their magicians are the best in their class. However, their resistance are very low and this is the main weak spot of High Men.
1. Casting Skill is your primary chokepoint throughout the entire game. It doesn't matter if you have mana, because if you're out of Casting Skill for the turn, you can't use your mana for anything. You might think this means that the Archmage retort, which boosts your Casting Skill development, is the best Retort in the game... but...
2. Alchemist is probably the most powerful retort choice in the entire game. Simply put, Alchemist means that you can treat Gold and Mana as the same resource pool. In the early-game when you have a very small Casting Skill, Gold tends to be your chief resource, and Gold units (those built in cities with Production; or bought outright using Gold) are the bulk of your army. But later in the game, when Casting Skill is higher and you're summoning more fantastic creatures and using a lot of buffs and so on, Gold becomes of limited use. Not so for the Alchemist! As long as your race has decent economy, you can usually set Mana to zero in your Magic allocation, which means more magic power going toward research... and most importantly, toward Spell Power to develop Casting Skill. If you need Mana, you just convert Gold. It's fairly easy with Alchemist to expend your entire Casting Skill every single turn and never run out of Mana even with Mana set to zero in the allocation.
3. Races which can't build Banks and Merchant's Guilds tend to have limited/niche strategies. Unless you know that race's strategy and intend to use it as such, stick to one that can build those two buildings as your main race. If your race can't build Engineers, try to capture a town of a race that can and keep it as an "Engineer School". Roads connecting your towns boosts economy (it often doesn't really help with transit speed, though).
4. Since Casting Skill is your primary chokepoint, it's critical to avoid wasting any Casting Skill. If you summon a fantastic creature and then you let it die in a battle, you've effectively wasted the Casting Skill you expended to summon it. Use the Wait command in battle to cycle your fantastic creatures so that the ones best able to soak damage (either by having the best defense or best HP) are the ones attacking the enemy units most likely to cause damage in their counterattack. Then, let your damaged fantastic creatures or those with weak defenses finish off the weakened enemy so that the enemy doesn't get much of a counterattack to potentially finish off your unit.
5. Remember that some units are inherently attackers and others are defenders. Magicians, for example, unless heavily buffed (or Trolls), are usually defenders. This is because although their attack potency is high and the ability to cast spells is a top-end skill, they lack the defense and HP to survive your attacked enemy's first turn. Of course, if the defender lacks ranged attackers at all in the battle, that's another story. However, if you park Magicians in your town, node, etc, and you get attacked, you're the one with the opening move, so you can target the enemy's ranged attackers and wipe them out so that your Magicians don't get splatted. High defense, high HP units make better attackers because they can survive the enemy's opening salvo.
6. In the long-term, normal units are pretty much useful for only three things. The first is early-game AI conquests. If you start pretty close to an AI wizard, you may be able to dispatch your initial swordsmen and catch their settlers before they can deploy into outposts, effectively crippling that AI's start. You might even be able to sack their capital city early on, depending on your race. Nomads' Horsebowmen, for example, can be built pretty early and inexpensively, arrive swiftly at the AI's town, and make it your own. The second thing is getting buffed into being powerhouses in lieu of (or in addition to) fantastic creatures. War Trolls, for example, get nasty really fasty if you buff them up. I've had Sky Drakes play the "avoid and don't engage" game in battles with buffed, flying War Trolls. The third thing is unrest control. Having 8 units on patrol in a town reduces unrest by 4, which means you can raise taxes more, which means more Gold (which with Alchemist means more Mana). It doesn't matter what kind of unit it is, so even if you just throw a stack of Spearmen into a town it'll do the job.
7. Avoid Wizard's Pacts. The enemy AI won't leave your territory alone like they expect you to do! They will flood your land with their units, clogging up your roads and for no apparent purpose. They will whack the nodes and ruins around your towns and take the treasure for themselves. Don't let them. Avoid Wizard's Pacts and then you can attack all those little one and two stacked enemy groups to keep your land clear, and, this is a tidy way to get experience for your units. You will take a diplomacy hit sometimes, but that's okay.
8. Life and Nature are inherently superior to Chaos and Death, because due to the alignment system in the game, they provide positive diplomacy whereas Chaos and Death are negative (though you want to avoid Wizard's Pacts, you still want to keep diplomacy near or at Neutral so the AI is less likely to declare war). Further, if the number of AI is large, a Chaos or Death AI will have a large pool of opponents to antagonize with their magic, and will suffer those diplomacy penalties themselves, increasing the likelihood that they will be at war with multiple other AI (and therefore too busy dealing with them to do much to you). Life and Nature have a lot of buffs which are just as good for you to use whether there's a few AI or many, and if you can kick back and buff up your cities and units while the AIs are picking on each other, you'll have a strong foundation to win.
7. This really depends on your preferred playstyle and game settings. Sometimes wizard's pacts and alliances can be worth it. Try to upgrade the pact to an alliance as soon as possible though, as that allows you to go into the wizard's territory the same way they can enter yours.
Oh, I didn't realize that had changed. I played as Death recently and everyone hated me, but I'd played Life and then Nature previously and everyone had seemed to want to get along with me, so I hadn't realized the change. Then again, on the Death game I kept squashing enemy units that came into my area and absorbing them into undead, so they probably just weren't fond of that.
It's definitely a YMMV situation but I've never found any benefit to it. There's no passive gain like commerce income, research pacts, etc, like in some later 4X games, and they'll trade spells with you even without a WP/A. But with WP/A they can clog up your territory with impunity, come into your area and snipe nodes and ruins that you weren't quite ready to clear yourself (the AI is often willing to sacrifice units more readily than I am), and they will constantly, relentlessly bother me trying to get me to declare war on other allies without any incentive (but if I ask them to join me in a war, they want me to bribe them). Meh.
Now, if you added something like "won't trade rares unless WP, very rares unless A", and like... some kind of trading value modifier based on relationship level (such that if relations are high, they'll become open to a more even-valued trade than normal)... then that might present an incentive for concerning oneself with positive diplomacy.