Lessons Learned on the way to Miraj Castle
Here are some things I did that worked for me. They may work for you, they may not. Some of these may have already been posted elsewhere. This is certainly not the only way to do it, but I wanted to post some info that may be helpful to you.

1. I ended up with 24 adventurers in 6 set groups. Two groups alternated on the main quest line, three groups did autoadventures every time they got back to 1000 endurance and one group mainly handled invasions if the two main groups were too tired.
2. There were two main career paths at the university, one for manual and one for automatic adventurers. The auto adventurers chose paths that would increas their autoadventuring skills. The manual adventurers increased their main attribute as much as possible, then chose a weapon to specialize on for the rest of the game, and worked on getting up to double and triple attacks. Two manual adventurers, one in each group, found time to study how to avoid encounters while resting.
3. I did not craft much armor other than rings and amulets, but a few times I crafted a bunch as I was leveling the blacksmith and everybody got new bling! I also made sure that everybody had a very level appropriate and awesome weapon. If a weapon is more than 5 levels old, make a new one.
4. Gear for main adventurers was chosen starting with primary stat and then constitution if possible. Gear score matters some, but not always. Sometimes the lower score item has more of what you need.
5. Gear for autoadventurers was all based on gear score. I did not care about stats, just what the highest score item was. I do NOT know if this was a good decision based on the game mechanics but it seemed to work for me.
6. Starting out, stay with encounters near or at the level of your adventurers. As they level up you will be able to take on adventures higher in level than you are. My Miraj killing party cannot wear anything that dropped in the Castle, because they are not high enough level to wear it yet.
7. I played with several party combinations and for me found that two damage dealers, a tank and a healer worked the best. I had very few deaths along the way, but there were a number of times where the healer saved the day.
8. I had two casters and two melee, and the melee both had long range weapons. This allowed every member of my party to hit every enemy from the beginning of the fight. Focus fire on one enemy until dead. An enemy with 1 hitpoint hits just as hard as one at full health. You will eventually learn how to leave almost dead enemies for your tank and healer to finish off, while your damage dealers move to the next mob.
9. Kill damage dealers first! When an encounter starts, look at the classes you are facing and decide the order in which you will focus your fire. Facing two rogues backed up by two wizards can be a lot of *fun*.
10. Level your blacksmith to level 45 and stop. I leveled mine to 50 but he didn't learn any new recipes after 45.

Above all have fun! If it isn't fun, then change something until it is. My sixth group is made up of four AOE damage dealers. Yes they die from time to time, but a lot of encounters are completely over at the end of the first round. :)