[johnarryn]

The awake pretender isn't so much to deal with indies as to deal with the ubiquitous early age rush nations... EA Ulm needs to come out the gate fast and get established quickly to be viable, I feel. Manually site searching with your mages can also be very useful.

The national troops are good, though, so as others have suggested it is possible to take a sleeping or imprisoned pretender for the sake of magical diversity.