[Psitticine]

I play with the immobile pretenders quite a bit. I think they make early expansion a little harder, although the trade-off of having them busy researching, casting search-spells, and making items tends to set you up a bit better in terms of development.

As time goes on, my mobile pretenders tend to "settle down" anyway, save for really huge battles such as taking out an enemy capital, so immobility seems to make less and less of a difference for me as the game goes on, powerful (and more expendible) summons become available, and so forth.