Cradle of Dominon (and my obsession) with Ermor...

[Endoperez]

Ermor is probably impossible to duplicate. We can't mod in dominion effects, population-death or similar things.

EDIT: The following suggestion is for playing against the evil races, not for playing AS evil races.
It would be possible to make Ermor start from multiple positions, each with a castle, a lab, a temple, an immobile Death mage and a magic site with little Death income. The temple will spread Ermorian dominion and the immobile mage will ensure that as long as there's at least one castle, there's at least one commander left to summon more mages.
Dominions 1 had a scenario that used Ermor like that. Several of the unique Death artifacts were spread out the Ermorian commanders.


Answers:
Dual-bless: effects Blessing has on sacred units depend on your pretender's magic, level 9 gives a special power, and dual-bless is two level 9s. Whether or not it works depends on the nation.

Automating spellcasting: Hover your mouse over the commander in map view, and press Shift+M. Press ? to see list of commands, there are similar keyboard shortcuts for research, patrol, blood hunt etc etc. You can't automate item forging.

You can't automate battle tactics, but you can save presets. When in troop placement view (shortcut 't'), hover your mouse over orders and press Ctrl-1 to save those orders into slot 1. The slots go rom 1 to 0. To paste the orders on some other unit, hover mouse over its orders are press a number.
You can save orders for commanders and units, but you can't give units commander-orders or commanders unit-orders.