I made some custom nation and tried to play against them.
Medium map, 6 other factions.
At the moment i know 3 factions and every leader is Verga. I think he is very successful
. Just cloned himself but i don't know the tech cloning.
So this is a bug.
(And it would be cool if we could assign a premade sovereig to a selfmade faction. This would solve the problem either.)