Favorite units / items / spell combo's (no rune mage / paladin)

[Hyvel]

What's everyone's favorite strategy, using a combination of units and/or items and/or spells? I'm looking for some inspiration for my next playthrough. As anything involving rune mages and/or gathering around paladins gets boring quickly in my opinion, I'd rather hear some other suggestions. As such it doesn't have to be zero losses for me, but I do play on impossible, and any strategy would still need to limit losses to be realistic I guess.

I'll start with some that I've used, including most of the usual ones:

- Royal snakes + the 3 additional damage snake rings and snake boots (I had 2 rings with my viking playthrough, but I heard someone even had 3 with a soothsayer class)
- Unlimited retaliation from demons / griffins + 95% physical resistance from items / spells, possibly in combination with target. In particular I never get tired of the demons getting non stop additional attacks when being swamped.
- Mass summoning army: Dryad + Royal Thorn + Demonologist + Druid + Demon/Engineer/Royal Griffin, ideally with Crown of Blackthorne + Whip + Assassins dagger for maximum damage from Royal Thorn + thorns summoned by Dryad and Royal Thorns. I really enjoyed this build, blocking the entire field with summons, but battles tended to last a while.
- Black knights + zlogn. Not possible in this game, probably for the better as is grossly overpowered and gets really repetitive
- Droids. Obviously overpowered, and simply boring.
- Goblin army - was overpowered in Crossworlds, but I think goblins might have been nerfed a bit now, not 100% sure though
- Orc army: again I think the backbone (Orc Veterans) might be nerfed a bit compared to Crossworlds...anybody sure on this one?
- Summoning mage: Book of Evil + Chaos Dragon + Ancient Phoenix. Fun to try once, but I found it to get old rather quickly as well.
- Alchemist + Engineer "melee" + crit hit chance items + dwarven leadership items. Both units have very wide damage range, so benefit greatly from critical hits, and can both hit multiple enemies from (mid) range. Was very powerful, but I couldn't resist and kept summoning droids with the engineer, so it got boring again.
- All girl army: dryad, forest fairy, lake fairy, demoness + whip / assassins dagger...I think the girl boosting dresses are no longer in the game right? Must be to prevent a cross dressing Olaf? I haven't tried it in Warriors of the North, but with the amazing Warrior Maidens added in the mix, this could still work very well.
- Soothsayers: I found Loki's touch to be extermely useful, and their basic damage is excellent as well. Some minor heal/resurrect, decent health, good initiative make for a borderline overpowered unit.

Things I haven't tried, but would be interested to hear if anybody else tried:
- Anti - undead army of priests, inquisitors, unicorns and black unicorns. Should be excellent against all the undead, and both unicorns again have a high max damage, so critical hits should be nasty.
- Spider army + 50% damage belt + whip / assasins dagger. Great damage output, but impossible to control losses somewhat?
- Demoness + Ancient Ent to get the Ancient Ent directly into melee range to use their amazing melee stats + rooting ability
- Any combination of Orcs + Vikings: there seem to be a bunch of Orc + Viking items: anybody found a particularly good combination?
- Imps / scoffer imps / cerberi: Anybody food a good combination for (some of) these units? They seem decent to me, but I never used them much.