[Baalz]

I haven't played them, but reading your guide a couple possibilities occur to me.

Body Ethereal/Gift of flight would be a pretty awesome addition to several of your national summons. You don't have any cheap national astral mages, but if you can snag some lizard shamen seems like this would be a pretty solid goto move - Ushabti, bone scorpions (if you're using shamen, toss on haste as well), servants of horus (niche, but scary in that niche as they fly in against, say tartarians or ice devils or bane lords or...), tomb swarms (ouch!). But where do you get a bunch of A2 casters?

Seems like you sell the tomb sorcerers way too short. With a little bit of TLC these guys are liquid awesome. What kind of TLC? Well, you should have tomb kings pumping out crystal shields (which is where you get a bunch of A2 casters). With a crystal shield this guy is 3f 2a 2d and a whole lot scarier. Winds of death are fun fun against plenty of nations and you've also now got arrow fend easily available if you want it. You've also now got an all in one easy package to drop wind guide and flaming arrows with a single (non tomb king) mage. Why stop there though? Once they've spit out a few crystal shields those tomb kings should spit out crystal matrixes. (heck, if you've got shamen use them as slaves and stretch your gems farther). With just 2 slaves and a master holding a crystal shield you're now looking at mass flight instead of gift of flight, and 2 more slaves opens up fog warriors for the big fights (sounds like a good time to pull out the chariots). After your wind guide you're also plopping down banefire now - screw that wussy thunderstrike. Probably want to use sorcerer slaves for that...but no worries because your slaves are spamming falling fires so they're definitely pulling their weight.

Leave those expensive tomb kings at home in the lab where they belong, and let the high priests carry the research, but the battlefields belong to the sorcerers (and hopefully their shaman thralls). Ok, high priests still have their place in blessing/buffing your troops, but its the sorcerers your enemies will fear.

Also, tomb princes can be recruited without a lab. They still need a temple, but you'll probably want that anyway for buried, so you could leverage that to save putting labs up initially. The 25% of tomb princes who get 2 random paths actually have the best gold/research ratio of your mages in a magic-1 scale (5 RP for 140 gold with sacred upkeep) and the rest aren't much below high priests. As long as you've got a bunch sitting around researching you can also use them as nasty little bombs with gift of flight...having used a gem to cast phoenix pyre. Hehe, they'll plow straight into clumps of troops and explode a few times each.