[Amorphous]

I have never used the Prince of Death with EA Arcoscephale, but I do see the point of it. Not being able to use the priestesses for healing your pretender is a drawback, but you do get a very decent death access.

I usually do not bother with death on the pretender, but that is more a matter of play style.

The Virtue is great with MA and LA Arcoscephale, but I seldom use it in EA. In this age, Arcoscephale practically begs for at least S3 and preferably more as it already has decent air access that goes to very good with to rings of wizardry and good crafting that becomes absolutely great with the same ring.

As for expansion, I do not see it as a big problem. As mentioned by others, chariots do work pretty well against independents, but you can actually do decent enough with slingers, peltasts and some cardaces under sloth 3. Your starting commander can lead 80 troops, so spending the first turn prophetizing him and buying 20 or so slingers will let you conquer one independent per turn. You need to reinforce now and again, of course, but you need nowhere near the full production capacity of your starting castle for that and independent commanders can move the troops.

As for early rushes, Arcoscephale's solution to that is the same as for most everything else - magic.
It probably has to do with what maps you play, but I find that rushes early enough to take a castle before a dormant pretender shows up very unusual. Especially if you take mage engineers into account.
However that might be, philosophers are very cheap and fast researchers under sloth 3, so materializing a rush before at least two levels of the players favourite school is researched is inordinately hard and requires a lot of luck as well as a very densely populated map. And even then it will not be that much of a rush.

First order of business for Arcoscephale is usually getting up a second castle, so shutting down troop and mage production is not as easy as just finding the capital and siegeing it.

In a very early rush, small and cheap sacreds will not have an easy time to get through the resource cheap troops Arcoscephale can field if necessary and large tough sacreds will not have the numbers to put a dent in the walls. When a small number of mystics and maybe an Oreiad arrives at the scene, things get ugly.

Certainly, dual blessed sacreds are tough opponents, but that goes for practically everyone - including starting pretenders. Arcoscephale's best defence against such things is magic, which is why it needs to research quickly. If it is rushed - which reasonably speaking will not happen till around turn 9 or so - a second castle should be well on the way, if not finished, and the castle walls will hold long enough for the philosophers to research some spells tailored against the attacking force and probably also long enough for the pretender to awaken.

I readily admit that I am not that accomplished in this game, but I think that the spectre of the early rush looms somewhat larger in peoples fears than what its performance in the game warrants.

To siege a capital you have to find it and get enough troops there to kill the defenders without suffering too many losses. This is hard, especially as the defender will see you coming. To manage this during the first half of the first year, you need to start very close to your rush target - no more than maybe two provinces between you - and even then the province type may present a problem.

Realistically speaking a rush will not happen until rather late in year one. And in that case a dormant pretender does become a factor.

From my limited multi-player experiences, the rushes I really have problems with tend to arrive somewhere in early year two. These rushes are hard to stop even with a SC - at least for me.