Hiho
another issue I would like to address is the scale and pace of the game, with important parts being the number of people and the amount&length of turns.
I think that if you really want the player to connect with the council over the ages, with its heroes and personalities, you have to severely limit the amount of people.
With one turn being one year you literally burn through the history right now.
Heroes have little time to develop any characteristics that actually raise them above their pure, hard stats.
Kalle starts young, but only a few turns later hes in his fifties, had to raise a kid or two and explored 3 hexes. Then he dies.
His successors start at age ~20, have an event or two, raise a kid each and then die.
After 60 turns (which are relatively short as turns go, just as in KoDP) you might be deep in the third generation having used and thrown away a good dozen heroes, very few of which will have left a mark on the players memory.
Now, I understand the game is early in its development and heroes will probably get many more chances to imprint themselves on the player, but even then the sheer number of heroes will detract from them having noteworthy impact.
To actually make AHD a game about individual people, a game where the death of a hero is more than the loss of a set of stats, it is necessary, in my opinion, to both put more turns into a single year (to allow for more stuff to happen in a year of life time) and at the same time decrease the overall number of heroes (to make the stuff that happened more important).
The seven people in the ring in KoDP have a "year" lasting five times as long, and STILL they have a hard time breaking into my mind as noteworthy. It is very rare that more than two or three manage to gain a "face" in their lifetime (again, lasting about 5 times as long as AHD heroes).
Contrast that to Crusader Kings, where for long stretches of time you only control one character (having only limited influence over a few others).
My gifted steward Duke of Barcelona who managed to grab the crown of Aragon is still remembered [by me]. His crusader son, adding two other King titles and a good chunk of France is too. As is HIS son, a military genius who lost almost all of his Spanish possessions to the infidels.
While you have events dealing with many people the focus is always the current ruler, and his direct line of succession. The characters in that line are game components and few of them will manage to become true "people", mostly only by inheriting the main characters stuff, but once they do the transition is smooth and at the same time they are individuals enough to make their own memorable impression on the player at that point.
Crusader Kings has an ocean of people without personality and without influence on the player.
By somewhat strictly focusing the player interaction to a single person however the characters that DO get to interact with the player gain all the higher influence.
I'll post a more concise suggestion later again hopefully after reading some other players thoughts on this.
I can spoil already that I think that focusing the game on a single person and its possible successors in title, tradition and role in the society might be a good idea though.
