I have no answer about leader portraits. When I open the game there is no portraits for players and leader portraits are all different and related to the right civilization.
Concerning turns, I don't know if there is any way to know who's turn is pending. The only thing I know is that there are two kinds of notifications when it's your turn to play :
- a message on Steam (upper right corner in the mean screen) ;
- an in-game message when you are already playing another Civilization game.
If there are people left missing tomorrow, I'll send a private message to everybody.
By the way, I suggest that we create a community to communicate easier with each other, one way or another but more efficient than this forum...