Personally, I would be quite disturbed if they decided to include women as leaders or in any other role, only to have them exposing a lot of cleavage. Let's keep the drool off the keyboard please and include women but have them just as modestly dressed as the men. I know that I personally do not play games to drool over the characters on the screen.... do you? I find the fact that women seem to only be included if they are half naked rather repulsive.
As far as a leader image, I would love to see a female leader who is in her 40s, greying and perhaps a little wrinkled... well, for the humans and altarians at least. I say this, because as far as I can tell, all human leaders ARE in their 40s or older, greying and a bit wrinkled in real life.... Has anyone seen a prime minister, president, or whatever that wasn't (with the exception of royals who inherit the crown early due to a death)?
I must agree though, not being a xenobiologist, that I have no idea if the other leaders are male, female, or something else. However, the names still suggest a male dominated society, e.g. "Lord" whatever.
Also, I must point out that it's not Strategy First who is designing the game. It's Stardock
Strategy First is primarily a distributor/printer who also publishes games from Paradox Entertainment, Primal Software and others that I can't think of off the top of my head. Paradox Entertainment's "Victoria - an Empire under the Sun" has several elements of feminism in it's earliest form, the Women's Suffrage movement, Queen Victoria, and Queen whatshername of the Netherlands (mid 1800s to early 1900s). So it's definitely not SFs fault
