[Dragar]

My personal take is:

• Research any key early techs needed, not including remote site searching. Just any buffs/combat spells critical to your early expansion
• Site search provinces surrounding capital to prime yourself with gems needed to remote site search (no point doing the research for them before you have the gems to get going)
• Return to research, normally hitting remote site search spells first
• Once you have a decent research capability going without your pretender, if he doesn’t have anything to do that no-one else can, send him off again to site search schools you can’t do remotely.