3 is a perfect number, not to much, not to few. If fireaxis think 3 is a big number, better don't have alternate leaders for all
Yeah, best to not have any alternate leaders and just leave it to a game mode where any leader not currently in the game is randomly selected as someone you can choose to lead with in the next era and you can rename the leader and civ each era. Or modding.
Alternatively, do what civ4 A New Dawn’s team did to get over 100 leaders in a modpack: Use already existing leader models with slight modifications and new voicelines to represent new leaders in a “Twin Leaders” DLC. Want Bismarck? Make Teddy Roosevelt have grey hair and give him an Iron Cross (funny actually, given they both were targeted for assassination and humiliated their would be killers). Want Napoleon? Remove Peter The Great’s moustache and give him black hair. You get the idea.
“But Doodles, no one would buy this crap! It would look so cheap!”
… Are you sure? You think people wouldn’t want to get officially supported Abraham Lincoln, Winston Churchill, Meiji, Napoleon, etc. and all their abilities and uniques just because the models and animations are similar to other leaders? …
I’d be very surprised. 5$ for me to get a Napoleon who could stack two Armies together? An English leader who could declare a blockade and attack any trade routes from a neutral party heading to an enemy I’m fighting, and take the wealth? A Bismarck who can do a once a game annexation of all city-state allies? A Khruschev who can give Nuclear Weapons to city-state allies (actually everyone should be able to do that)? And 17 others? These abilities I just listed might be ridiculous but you get the idea.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate already did this with Echo Fighters and far as I know, it worked out just fine. No one called them lazy over it, and it didn’t ruin the game.
Just to be certain though, they could check the sales of a tiny version of this with like 5 leaders.
If it works they do a bigger one, if it fails then I was wrong and most civvers apparently actually care enough about leaderhead model uniqueness to not spend 5$ to get the ability to give nuclear frickin weapons to frickin city states with sharks with fricking lazer beams attached to their heads!