Tactic Suggestion: the Pythian Doom Pope

[Poopsi]

It´s not that ellaborate. Likely as not you´ll be spamming arch theurgs anyway (it´s not like there are that many worthwhile recruitable commanders at the capital). And you can make them do this thing out of the box. Heck, you dont even need the items: just script air shield, then whatever spell you want to use (horror mark is specially tempting because it works most of the time), then recall.

Soul slay is an interesting twist, but I dont know how effective it would be out-of-the-box (and one of the nice things about this one is that you can use it with your waiting arch-theurgs while you assemble an army, a communion, or whatever).

[Poopsi]

Addenum: Soul slay Doom Popes work very well, particularily against PD. In fact, I lost a Doom Pope because he wiped out the PD of a province, the coutnerattack had cavalry (solution: spam less soul slays, and beam back home sooner). The only objection I have is that Soul Slayers are more research-intensive.