[Squirrelloid]

Winged Dog:
Most rushers I've seen don't have an awake pretender. They're rushing with blessed sacreds, and their pretender is some imprisoned monstrosity which fuels the bless. So getting cut off by a flying pretender isn't as much of an issue.

In my mind, a real rush starts year 1. Year 2 is when indies start disappearing, so its not really a rush anymore. I find it extremely unlikely your opponent has enough scouts in position to know where to pop a flying pretender to cut you off that early.

Also, ideally you move your army to intercept the rusher in a province, so he doesn't see the battle coming. Hard to cut off an army you didn't know you'd be fighting.

Stealth forces are also slower to move into position than otherwise. A rush needs to be fast. If he's dicking around with a stealth army he has to spend turns moving it ahead of his rampaging main army, which means his rampaging main army isn't really rampaging anymore.

(The real key here is that there exists a bottleneck where you can predict the enemy's attack on some turn. So its plausible to have more than one retreat province. A line of provinces simply gives you the luxury of having multiple choices for how soon to engage.)

Also, I somewhat agree on getting researching mages out of the lab. OTOH, sometimes you need a little extra time to research up something special, and if you figure you're dead anyway, turtling to finish that critical research so you can deal the attacker a defeat or at least make him accept a pyrrhic victory makes some sense.