Franks,
I think you have to look at GLs as a pile of gold that you can spend in a couple of ways. If you hold that pile of gold in a shoe boxe for 1500 yers you are losing value plus you are excluding any possible chance of getting an additional leader; both options are bad outcomes in my book.
What to do with the first leader is always a debate and that usually breaks down to the Army+HE route vs the quick FP route. There are trade offs for both options. You had already used your first GL for the FP so that sort of makes that debate a moot point.
Your choice to hold your second GL for the equivalent of two whole eras and over 1500 years is always a bad decision in my book. In the interim period you had the option to use the GL for an immediate pop into Smith's, TOE, Suffrage, Hoover, or any one of about 12 other build items. Using a Great leader to build one of the global or continental effects wonders in a bogus corrupt frontier town that is still safely away from sneak attack by enemies allows you to save the production in your core for other uses. You may have gotten these wonders anyway but they would have come at the cost of shield production plus a latter completion.
You'll have to do the math yourself because I can find absolutely no valid strategy for holding the GL for the length of time you chose to hold the leader. Every other option that you could of chosen including building a university in a coastal city near your core would have yielded a higher benefit in your game. Not only did you have to pay a unit of gold per turn to store the leader for over 150 turns, you also forfeited any benefit that would have been gained by having the other rushed wonder 30 or 40 turns earlier.
Note that we are not talking about foregoing the option to build the UN on the same turn as you discover Fission because I would pre-build it with the palace if I had no access to a fresh GL during that period.
On the topic of using 26 Great Leaders in a game:
Wonders are always nice. I used GLs to instantly build:
The Heroic Epic
Forbidden Palace
The Great Library
Sun Tzu's
Sistine
Leonardo's
Copernicus*
Bach's Happy Temple
Newton's*
Smith's (adds about 100 gpt to the economy from free harbors, markets and banks.)
Magellan's
Wall Street
Pentagon
Military Academy*
TOE
with the exceptions of the wonders marked with an asterisk, most of the wonders can be built almost anywhere on a continent and have the same effects. Some effects are even global, so Smith's on a one tile island is still a great deal.
I am not a strong supporter of armies as a substitute for fast mobile forces but they can be a great breaker for strong units fortified in hill town when all else would fail. At one point I had six armies with only two or three units loaded into them when they had a capacity of 4 units. Two elite cav units that already have the asterisk from producing a GL make a great strike force unit in an army. I was not using these alot but they made me feel good.
I had two empty armies that were from GLs and 3 armies produced from the Military academy that never even had a unit loaded into them before a disbanded them to rush a university somewhere. Sometimes when you are attacking it is not possible to get the GL back to a town right away and in that case, building another army may be the best choice.
In most games, you will find two or three great city locations that are on a point of land that can support a full pop of 12 entirely on water. The problem becomes shield production to buiild improvements to support the population in the mid game. A university in a coastal town that only produces 2 shields but that produces 36 raw gold units can convert that city to science powerhouse.
In the 26 leader game, I strategically built some universities with GLs when no other wonders were available.
For the excess cash, invest it in something. Anything in your treasury in excess of 1000 gold is just growing mold in your coffers. Coastal cities near your core will often provide the greatest ROI for added banks and universities that otherwise might take 30 or 40 extra turns to complete.
Don't be too rigid in your assessment of what might be the cause of problems you have encountered in your current style of play. Your decision to avoid Democracy and difficulties with war weariness are all functions of how you currently approach the problems set before you and I assure you that they are not necessarily the correct approaches to succeed in many circumstances.
