Possibly best setups for different races on higher difficulties?

[occasionalplayer]

I have thought of the following: 

Barbarians: Blitz setup (Alchemy, Archmage, Conjurer, Mana Focusing, Specialist, death books or death/Sorcery): Ghouls with darkness and path finding low tier unit to guide conquest. Bootstrapping rather easy. Could also work with sprites, but then, no bootstrapping (and counterveils the purpose of barbarians). 

The same as above with High Elves, but then with Sprites, since they don't need or can't make use of path finding. Should also work with klackons/inquisitor.

Dwarven: Life and hero strat. Alchemy, possibly mana focusing, hope for a good starting location. Then sage master, artificer and possibly famous (though famous not necessarily needed if just cause is cast). Strategy: Rush buy your town with resources, cast heroism on heros that come and give them plus 20 casting skill artifacts. If you get Zaldron e.g. you will soon obtain huge levels of research. Militarywise, mass produce golems (or, if you can, send out a hero stack with good artifacts and perhaps invulnerability). 

On the whole, warlord seems slightly underwhelming if you have alchemy. 

Any more thoughts on the other races?

[Seravy]

Let's see, my guess would be these (untested and probably can be improved a lot)

Barbarians :
Warlord, Alchemy, Tactician with Life books.
Berserkers are fragile but if you can buff their armor and resistance they are crazy powerful. Life magic doesn't need too much resources and works well in the early game. Late game spells can make the berserkers useful again at the point where they'd be obsolete otherwise. Life magic has trouble ealing with flying enemies, and barbarians can help with that.


Gnoll :
Chaos with Alchemy and Specialist.
Gnolls are strong in the early game and due to their already high attack per figure, benefit well from Flame Blade. Chaos can easily get rid of walls, the greatest obstacle to gnoll invasions. Gnoll cities can have Sage's Guilds unlike other early races, which is critical for a Chaos wizard. Mana/skill can be covered by cities of other races conquered, as those are relevant only when higher rarity spells are researched.

Halfling :
Chaos with Sage Master, Specialist, Chaneller.
Accelerated research and combat casting capability to make up for weak military. In the early game, Gargoyles do well enough to stay in the game.

Lizardmen :
Death, Archmage, Specialist.
Extreme rate of expansion is supported well by "free" undead units to protect the rapidly growing territory. By the time Lizardmen units become obsolete, either high level summons or curses can finish off the remaining enemies.

High Elf :
Nature, Conjurer, Specialist.
Longbowmen are supported very well by Nature spells. Gaea's Blessing and Change Terrain ensures a very high population for maximal racial power production. Already decent top tier military units can be unstoppable with adamant created through Transmute. The race is a bit fragile in the early game, relying mainly on bowmen, but cheap and powerful summons can fill in that gap.

High Men
Warlord Tactician 2 Nature 7 Life
The main selling point of this race is its good selection of powerful late game units, so both military improving retorts go well with it. Life books to further power up these units and to make up for the race's low resistance. Two nature books for web, as High Men have a hard time dealing with flying enemies otherwise - Paladins and Pikemen cannot attack them.

Klackon
Not sure
The beetles don't benefit all that much from buffs due to single figure and the race is neither weak nor strong in magic power. I think this race goes well with most setups.

Nomad
Chaos Sorcery Chaneller
Horsebowmen are strong enough units to get you through the early game especially when supported by Sorcery magic and mobile enough to be able to defend your territory effectively even if outnumbered. Once in the late game, the mix of the two strongest late game realms should be more than enough to win, even through sheer force of combat spells - which is important, nomad units are good but not as powerful as other endgame races.

Orc
Sorcery, Warlord.
Cheap units help getting past the early game and warlord ensures they are not as worthless as they otherwise would be. Quick growth helps building a strong enough empire in a timely manner to reach the powerful late game options of Sorcery magic.

Troll
Death, Warlord, Alchemy, 2-3 Nature books.
Wraith Form on warships for mobility. As all units regenerate, summoning other regenerating units ensures no losses of units through the game. Blood Lust works very well on trolls as well. Since the strategy is primarily using the military might of the race, Warlord and Alchemy for additional punch. Tactician is less important as units regenerate anyway - damage taken is not a problem. Unfortunately trolls don't fly - 2 Nature books for web, or even 3 for web+earth lore should be considered.

Beastmen
Sorcery, Specialist, Sage Master
Beastmen are a good race that can perform well on its own both early and late, pairing it with the best late game realm, and the two retorts capable of accelerating research in the realm should have the best results.

Dwarf
Nature/Life Warlord Alchemy Tactician
A strong military race that benefits well from all buffs you can apply to their units. Their already very productive cities benefit from city buffs as well. Nature magic is essential because Dwarven units are slow and the race relies on cannons often, so slowing or immobilizing enemy units and removing their flight is critical.

Draconian
Inquisitor Warlord Alchemy Mana Focusing Tactician with some life and maybe sorcery books
Early super buffed doom drakes have proven to even beat impossible sometimes.

Dark Elf
Nature+Chaos
Nature to support an all-ranged race both by slowing enemies and summoning strong melee units. It also helps the growth problems and might provide Nightblades with adamantium.
Chaos to take advantage of the huge power advantage offered by the race, and to wreck the arcanus plane through global spells, taking advantage of the more favorable distribution of players as a Myrran wizard (2+2)

[GermanJoey]

Klackon
Conjurer, Archmage, Specialist, Sage Master, 8 nature (or Mana Focusing + 7 Nature, or Astrolger instead of Archmage)
The best research setup; Klackon cities get online very quickly due to high production and high taxes and thus get their library/uni/sage guild very quickly, whose output is enhanced by Sage Master, Specialist, and Conjurer.

Conjurer w/ sprites helps you take early dungeon/lairs/nodes. All this gets you to the powerful rare/very-rare green summons. In addition, Transmute can get you adamantium for cheap, strong halbers.

Dwarves
Myrran, Inquisitor, Astrologer, Specialist, 6 nature. Rich resources.
The main idea here is to abuse Dwarves' resource doubler and then transmute basically everything into crystals for an immense power income. Inquisitor helps you expand early and get miners guilds online. Astrologer also allows you to spam Earth to Mud and Web wherever you want, allowing you to easy take many lairs/nodes/etc with Steam Cannons. Resist Elements is good on those too. Gaia's Blessing helps boost the Dwarves' horrible growth rate and purify corruption.

Barbarians
Warlord, Alchemy, Specialist, Archmage, 8 sorcery.
Pretty straightforward. Barbs are good early, Blue is good late. Use berserkers, cavalry, and bowmen to clear various neutral stuff to fuel your economy. Resist Magic and Guardian Wind help shore up some of the barb's biggest weaknesses. You always want Alchemy when choosing barbs (they can't build Alchemist Guilds).

Trolls
Myrran, Archmage, Sage Master; and then either Specialist + 7 blue, or Runemaster, 3 blue, and 3 white
While Death Trolls is centered on Blood lust + War Trolls, this strategy focuses (get it?) on Troll Magicians. Focus Magic + Magicians is a very powerful combo in general, especially since blue has many powerful battle spells that cost exactly 35 mana (e.g. Phantom Beast, Mind Storm, Banish, Stasis, Invisibility). However, magicians are very fragile. That's not the case with Troll Magicians, however; they have many hits, high defense, and regenerate. Once you get invisibility and spell lock, your magician stack will be almost impossible to kill and can crush almost anything. White buffs can enhance this further, but then I recommend you get Runemaster since you won't have specialist's spell resistance nor will spell lock be guarenteed.

Draconians or Lizardmen
Myrran, Astrologer, Runemaster, Specialist, 5 Chaos books. (7 books for lizards)
Draconians have a special relationship with Chaos Channels - because they already fly and already have a fire breath attack, it will always give them +3 defense. That's pretty damn nice, and makes Doom Mastery super awesome, especially if you can get Chaos Surge as well. Alternatively, if you cast CC manually, you can stack on FB+EW beforehand.

With either race, use buffed ranged units to take out Chaos Nodes to help fuel your economy. Lizardmen get up to speed a lot faster, but their units are worse. Take special note of whenever you get +3 defense on your turtles; be sure to cast Immolation on these guys. They're extremely difficult to kill and enemy units will kill themselves in droves smashing into them.

Beastmen
Myrran, Warlord, Archmage, Specialist, Sage Master, Inquisitor, 4 White.
Beastmen are probably the best race for Inquisitor, as they have 6 different outstanding units that are good in different situations, plus Engineers. Inquistor helps you get your cities up to speed faster, with very little downside. Warlord + white buffs help make your units even better. Beastmen cities have great output, and thus you'll get quite a lot out of life's myriad powerful city enchantments.

Halflings
Astrologer, Sage Master, Specialist, Cult Leader, 7 Black
Halfling have very good economy but crummy units. Ghouls, Werewolves (find mithril!), Night Stalkers, and Zombies give you something with some meat on its bones to make up for that. Wall of Darkness gives your slingers and ghouls perfect cover. Dark Ritual + Cult Leader will eventually give you huge power income. Astrologer helps you spam drain power and hexes, as well as take advantage of some early node conquests.

Orcs
Famous, Charismatic, Inquisitor, Cult Leader, Alchemy, Warlord, 5 White.
Orcs have one of the best economies, but their units suck. Here's a great method for getting good units with orcs! You could take Specialist instead of one book, but you'll really want those awesome life city enchantments so be careful about taking too many retorts.

Nomad
Sage Master, Runemaster or Channeler, Conjurer, 4 Nature, 4 Death
Nomads have very poor growth, and so Gaia's Blessing and Skeletons are a godsend. Land-linked Adamant Werewolves are extremely strong, especially with Survival Instinct. Cloaked, Land-linked Spiders and Adamant Wraith-Form Horsebowmen are an extremely cheap, powerful, and mobile stack. Later, Griffons can keep up with Wraiths and Death Knights. Channeler+Conjurer let you spam zombies and centaurs wherever you want for pennies on the dollar, as well as use Life Drain and Syphon life to full effect.

Dark Elves
Myrran, Guardian, Runemaster, 3 blue, 3 green
Dark elves are hella slow and their units are extremely expensive and fragile. Guardian buys you time without forcing you to waste lots of resources on defending yourself; dark elves' range attack hits very hard once it gets some + to-hit. Here, you can use various Focus Magic combos (nagas, sprites, spiders, cockatrices) to conquer stuff to speed up your economy, and then use various buffs (focus magic, resist elements, elemental armor, transmuted adamantium, invisibility) to keep your candy-assed units alive. If Gaia's Blessing and Conjure Roads shows up in your book, man are you gonna be happy.

Gnolls
Inquisitor, Sage Master, 2 Nature, 2 Sorcery, 2 Death, 2 Life, 2 Chaos. Maximum Magic. Impossible Difficulty.
Get down with the Gnoll Challenge, or get wrecked! Bitch!

[GermanJoey]

Oh, I forgot a couple:

High Elves:
Mana Focusing or Sage Master, Cult Leader, Runemaster, 4 White, and 4 Black.
High Elves are pretty flexible, albeit slow, and go well with pretty much anything, so here's something different, that will help you speed their growth significantly and gain a huge domestic power income.

High Men
Warlord, Inquisitor, Specialist, Tactician or Cult Leader, 7 Life
IMHO High Men are the "classic" Inquisitor race, as they have a variety of powerful high end units, a purifier, engineers, great economy, and terrible unrest tables. They've got it all, as long as they can get there - and Inquistor helps them get there twice as quickly. Life-buffed Paladins will crush everything non-flying, while Life-buffed High Men Magicians (6 figures!) will crush everything else. Tactician goes well with Life, because you'll also want to buff up Heroes. (and the high men don't mind the extra defense). Cult leader, OTOH, is nice for high men to keep taxes high and get the most out of the religious buildings that you'll be forced to build early.

[occasionalplayer]

That is quite impressive. Thank you for the many inspirations. Interesting to see how your suggestions differ.

More interesting aspects would be: 

Which of the customizable starting settings are best for which race?

My assessment: 

Rich minerals of course for all myrran races and especially dwarves. Poor...well maybe on arcanus for those who are bad at expanding in order to keep the AI in check.

Tiny landmass obvious for Lizard, Draconian, sorcery wizards. Huge landmass...?

Wet Climate good for Lizardmen; Dry climate good for dwarfs (gems!).

And: which is the fastest setup to attack nodes?
In the original game, it was probably Alchemy/Archmage/Node Mastery/Conjurer/Sorcery Mastery 1/4/1 and magic spirits spamming phantom warriors, trying to find a node with a Djinn/Phantoms and defeating it on attrition. 
Does not work any longer obviously? What's frequently been suggested (CC/EW/FB) is not really fast IMO and probably comes with high casualties. I may be wrong of course.

[GermanJoey]

Yeah, one of the great things about the game is that there's lots of different ways to play. A few of the suggestions I gave were just to add something different than what Seravy had.

I tend to almost always play on Rich minerals (i think that this setting makes settling decisions more interesting), standard landmass, standard climate. I don't recommend trying to twist the map to make your own setup more advantageous... just find the kinda map you wanna play on and then adjust the difficulty setting so that it gives you a challenge. But - poor resources would be better for barbarians. Tiny landmass would be better for nomads, dracs, and lizards; huge landmass would be better for orcs, lizards, high men, and beastmen. Dry/wet climate is better for green, due to change terrain and Gaia's Blessing.

It's true that while massed CC/EW/FB ranged isn't fast at clearing nodes compared to what you could do in MoM, it's still pretty fast for CoM, at least as far as attacking general nodes goes, and especially considering that its using Chaos, the weakest realm early game (but one of the strongest later). As far as taking casualties goes, that's just something you'll have to get used to. The days where you can clear half the map with just magic spirits are long, long gone. CoM is a way, way faster-paced game than MoM was, and you need that treasure and node power income if you want to keep up with the AIs. Suiciding a whole stack of units just to wear down a node enough so your main army can take it with the next battle isn't too unusual. Alternatively, you can take retorts like Cult Leader that allow you to do OK without needing to take nodes early.

The earliest node clears in CoM are finding all-melee nodes and then wearing them down over successive turns with massed sprites. (make sure to turn off combat animations!) Alchemist+Astrologer+Barbarians+Green (for just web and/or earth to mud) would also be able to clear most node types pretty early. white won't really be able to clear nodes early, except maybe by spamming Heroism on Centaurs or Horsebowmen or something like that. (very expensive though) Nor is black, although there's some blue nodes you can wear down with zombies if you have Astrologer. once you get shadow demons though, you can clear the same sorta stuff you could with sprites. Astrologer Blue can get some nodes by kite around with a cavalry and spamming Confusion and Phantom Warriors, and some others with vertigo.