They closed the thread I brought this up in (cuz it was a duplicate thread in not one sense, but two), so I'm bringing it up here, since at least one person liked the idea.
There could be an option to affect the quality of leaders you get based on the number of military and naval manufactories within your nation. In that other thread, I defended the notion (and will repeat here) by pointing out that Naval Manufactories have increased effect in Fish provinces, based on the premise that most seamen started as fishermen. If Naval Manufactories are training sailors, it makes sense that Military Manufactories are training soldiers, and that both could be training capable leaders. There might even be room for conscription centers and shipyards. This would be an alternate (and obviously more complicated -- lots of parsing of the save game file to figure out) way of implementing a "Size of Nation" modifier to leader generation. Portugal doesn't get more leaders for colonizing the coast of Africa, but the big nations get more and better leaders than the little nations because they have more room for manufactories, or more core provinces for conscription centers if those are included.
I also expressed the notion that the line of thought leads one towards the idea of a "base leader value" calculated to 5 decimal places (which is traditional) that is modified by everything that has been proposed so far, then a smaller variance from that base that is the same for every nation. It does violence to the notion of "Random leader", but again, I have one person who doesn't like the notion of totally random leaders giving me the courage to speak out.
The real trick, if it were done that way, would be making sure that Leader-affecting factors aren't simply duplicates of morale-affecting factors. That gives the morale-affecting factors a multiplying effect that would unbalance the game. For example, the DP slider threads in the FAQ section already show an attachment towards Quality. It's not a huge lead over Quantity, but how much bigger would it be if Quality gave you better morale *and* better leaders?
Which leads to the idea that you find "lopsided" sliders, then *manufacture* reasons for the unfavored slider end to give you better leaders. But that's leaning away from history and towards gaming the system. For example, Quantity. With a bigger pool of soldiers to pull from, you're more likely to accidentally draft that one tailor who discovers a remarkable military genius lurking inside him. It's a manufactured reason to make Quantity more attractive to the Quality diehards. If that's necessary. Of course, the Quantity diehards would then leap for joy. Oh well.
