Wouldn't it be neat if you had leaders with individual abilities and traits. Traits are nuetral, they aren't necceserily bad or good, just they affect the game in some way. Their goodness or badness depends on the strategy you are intending to follow.

Abilities come in two kinds, positive abilities and negative ones and come in three levels of proficiancy. You have a certain number of penalty points to give your leader and a certain number of bonus points. You are able to add penalty points, in exchange for extra bonus points, so you can deliberately make very powerful characters in one area, in exchange for handicapping them in another area.

Each civilization designs one custom character at the same time as choosing their starting party. That is the only character they can design directly. You can decide whether your character is male or female (I think that you should be able to have a male and female cinematic for each race in negotiations, depending on the gender of the foreign leader) and maybe you should be able to choose a portrait for them.

You also decide how old your character is depending on race. Humans can be anything between 16 and 120 (any human who reaches 120, retires automaticly), anyone who reaches 120 retires automaticly. The younger your leader, the less likely they are to get events that kill him/her, but the less bonus points you get, older leaders are more vulnrable to dying from events, but have more experiance, and thus have more bonus points. Your intitial leader is important as it's the only leader you design directly (the others are randomly made).

Leaders with weak espionage skills are easier to assasinate also.

The game randomly generates a new leader every time the ruling party changes hands. However you have no control over what kind of leader this is, nor is there necceserily any quality check, you could get complete imbeciles elected or complete geniuses. The strengths and weaknesses of these leaders will tend to reflect the party that they are the leader of, but not always.

You have pool of six successors to choose from, these are randomly generated just like party leaders of other parties, but you have the option to select the best one, who has the abilities you want to be your successor. Every so often your pool of available successors changes and you can then check to see if anyone better than your present successor is available.

Rulers age over time and may even pick up more abilities, weaknesses and traits over time according to their actions. Some traits polarise alignments against eachother, such as the good fanatical moralist trait while others such as the honourable trait in evil, help make alignment change easier and indeed more likely in a civilization ruled by that leader.