A few reflections before moving to HoW.
Good armour is scarce. Its not till the severed hand and dorn's deep that you find anything. You have to buy your own platemail, stock up with protection items and use spells and potions (snake scales, agility, defensive harmony etc). High Dex, as always, helps.
Low level spells rock! I must've used grease constantly - it turns every battle. Stinking cloud, magic missile, mirror image, acid arrow, web and flame hands are all essential. Flame hands helps ennormously in confined spaces. It is only slightly weaker than magic missile but delivers the impact to an area instead of one enemy.
The best tactic, bearing n mind the two factors above, is to stock up on missile weapons and level 1 spells. There are a few long stretches where you may run out of arrows. But you can use a bard and dual class mages and it doesn't matter that you don't have high level spells till later.
Whilst some of the set piece battles have changed I still think my original tactics work. But HoW puts some nasty surprises in IWD.
HoW next.