Mages Fighting Tactics
There are 2 usual ways:
Hit & run
Many mages choose this way of fighting due to low con and the pause between casting offensive spells. This is a good tactic to kill high monsters, I know cases when low mages killed 26k squids with just fire darts. This way of fighting usually costs a lot of cash, because when you reenter a room you are hitted twice, thus if you hit and run you are hitted twice as much as you were hitted if stayed in room for the whole fight.
Normal fight
Drop all food on the floor - you can eat it from the floor, having in your inventory only pipe and staff, then you fight with your staff and the most powerfull offensive spell you have. At high weapon skill, you may find out that haste spell will do more damage than offensive spell. With high dex and nothing in inventory you will dodge most of the hits.
Before starting the fight
Mage should have casted dp and ss or armour (or blur, if low level) before adventuring. Deeppockets will allow you to carry a lot of stuff and having items in dp doesn't affect your dodging. Armour or Stoneskin will lessen the damage you will take when you are actually hit and blur will lessen the chance to be hit at all, but it is not very effective. If you are choosing 2nd way of fighting then Strengh spell could prove very usefull.
Something to make fighting more intresting
You will find it very usefull to throw barbed darts and boomerangs - they will decrease your opponent dex thus make them easier to hit and to elude.
Mages can raise archery ability pretty fast, just grab some easy bow and start shooting arrows, almost every hit will raise your archery by a point. Mages raise mms skill very slowly, so you will miss pretty much, but it is possible. There are more than one way for a mage to use bow - you can try fighting in ranger's style - shoot enemy till he gets angry, then charm him and start shooting him again, I am not saying its affective - I prefer normal fight, but... also you can shoot some arrows before the fight starts so you will do some damage before the fight begins. Another thing with arrows - you can poison them - if you can find a rogue with high poison ability and have nightshade to spare.
Also you can use throwing weapons - the best way to raise thrown weapons ability are darts, with high throwing weapons ability, some mages like to throw a hunga or 2 in the beginning of a fight or between casting spells.