I’m not 100% sure, but I think if rusher did make some planning as well and didn’t select you as a target counting “eenie meenie miney mo” diplomacy would’t help you much.
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Your third defense against a rush is strategic. Make your first expansion force or two move in straight lines away from your capital, leaving naught but a single path back. While it leads him right to your capital, it also means you can predict exactly what route he's going to take. This lets you fight those decisive battles in predictable locations away from your capital if you so choose. Knowing how your opponent is going to move is a major advantage.
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Wouldn’t attacker then just fight your main forces with his army and cut out your only retreat route with flying pretender or stealth forces for example? Wouldn’t he think you are too bold to start expansion close to his capital while you have lots of indy provinces around yours?
The only thing I’m agree with is planning your early game would help you to survive. I’ve seen people planning their game like: “Oh, well, here’s my pretender. Good astral magic for forging rings of sorcery and spamming wishes, lots of death magic to summon tartarians… And since he’s too expensive and useless without research I’ll make him imprisoned, so when he’s awake he’ll be able to cast some great spells. All I need is to do now is start searching for magic sites with my mages for the first year, so he had enough gems when he breaks free. Voila!” And when jaguar warriors come knocking on the their door they say: “Oh, feck!” and are gone in 5 turns, because their army isn’t strong enough for jags, they have no research and they have no pretender to protect them.
Another extremism – players researching in the labs to the death. If you can’t repel enemy by rough force – get your mages out of the lab for the god sake! You can’t take research in the grave with you, even low level spells could break the combat.
People often underestimate the value of researcher pretenders while they are very good for nations with weak troops, but strong mages. Would your neighbour dare to strike at you if you have mages unbound to the lab capable of spaming spells like: numbness, lesser elementals, earth meld, farstrike, skellspam and such on turn 4, and even more dangerous spells later on?