Which Haven heroes do you prefer?

If you retrain all the monks into knights (which is quite possible with Elaine, even without gold mines), it frees up space in your army.

I usually do that. Six decent stacks are more than enough to win, even without monks. It's important to train them on time. And if you develop diplomacy, you'll attract much larger and more serious forces (during one game, 500 latniks, 600 archers, and 23 angels joined me). That's pretty good, wouldn't you agree? In the end, you get more than you expected.