[Nick_K]

For one thing, construction has few actual spells, but these include some good ones - it's quite a handy path for earth mages with battlefield spells, summons and global enchantments.

As for items, there are lots of uses for them. Off the top of my head:
- Path boosting items are often a far cheaper way than empowerment to cast more powerful spells in paths you don't already have a powerful mage in.
- Items can allow land units to go underwater. They get the poor amphibian penalties, but in some cases it can be very worthwhile.
- Supply items such as bags of wine allow very large armies to be fielded without starving

I'm not going to go into detail about SCs and so on because I only play SP so I doubt I'm very efficient there. SCs are a bit of a cheesy tactic in singleplayer: the computer cannot handle them so it more or less guarantees victory. It's about on par with playing the ashen empire... fun sometimes but not really a challenge.
However, equipping commanders with items is a fun thing to do which I really enjoy, even if these far-from-SC individuals might not live too long.

If you want effective uses of combat magic items, a SC does not have to be a pretender, any powerful summon will do. A tricked-out wraith lord or elemental noble can slaughter a huge AI army. I had an amusing battle recently where a wraith lord in friendly dominion with woundflame singlehandedly defeated an army of well over a thousand lanka troops incluing a dozen or so mages. However, equipping regular human commanders, even fairly elite ones, is unlikely to result in the same ridiculous effects; I find this makes it more fun, but in terms of benefit... not so much. A few nations (such as EA Jotunheim) have commanders who make good recruitable SCs when equipped with items but most do not.
Assassins can be equipped with magic items as well, which can dramatically increase their killing power. This can be important if you're hunting an enemy pretender in order to shut off a global spell, for instance.
Finally, if you can cast 'forge of the ancients' then you can potentially make items incredibly cheaply. Being able to equip every commander in an army with boots of quickness and a rod of the phoenix at negligable gem cost is quite a nice boost.