I found out that respeccing your characters doesn't delete the abilities they've learned so I changed my 1½ mages into pure archers with only a couple of geo spells for the oil effects. It's going slightly better now but the fact that I 'need' to do this is utter rubbish, especially considering a part of the appeal of DOS1's tactician mode (at least to me) was that despite the difficulty you could still use any party setup as long as you remained within reasonable boundaries.
