Anyway, on a side note, this is EXACTLY why I don't want to discuss new civs or leaders for the new civs. People start talking about them and making requests and it only distracts us from the actual mod, which is more important IMO.
That is exactly where we do not agree. The modpack civs are exactly as important as the first 38 civs you include in the first release. What's more, I think this is one of the main things where Diplomacy can be better than many other big mods: giving the exactly awesome quality in every aspect of the game
for all the civs. Unit, building and leader art, unique personalities and diplomacy texts, custom music and sounds, carefully balanced UUs and UBs, the 14 traits and trait combos as perfectly "balanced" as possible, and we can continue this list...
But the most important thing is that all of these are for every civ and all of the leaders!!!!
Having said that, I respect your view of things, and I even agree the first priority is that the mod itself should be perfectly balanced in all ways possible. Thus I always try to separate everything to base things and modpack things.
But I only agree with that because those civs comes earlier
In my point of view the only difference of the other civs/leaders should be that they are availeable later with modpacks, otherwise the base civs shouldn't be superior in anything.
Just to give an example, LHs: If some of the add-on civs have more then two quality leaders, I don't get why all of them can't be in. Speaking of Mexico, Italy, Poland, Iran, Austria, Hungary, maybe a couple more. I can't see why these civs would be inferior to some of the base civs, especially when we are speaking of leaders.
Btw not many custom civs have 3-4 quality leaderheads, so we are talking about 8-10 LHs for the whole mod