Sim City 3000* had petitioners come and make petitions to you, and give you a choice of action (usually just a yes/no choice, but I think multiple choices and even sliding bars would give a greater feel of individuality and control as a emperor). They then respond to your decision (in a block of text). You also have one of your advisors (whoever is the advisor of that department, with their own personality) offer their opinion alongside the petition before you make a decision, and the counselor/advisor also responds as well.

*The other Sim Cities might've had this too, I don't know.

I think it'd be great if you had more than one counselor/advisor chime in from time to time, and offer different advice on the same petition. Say you have 5 counselors (each with their own personalities, histories, and knowledge of different areas of the workings of your kingdom), if for every petition or report presented to you one to three counselors offer a paragraph alongside the petition, and give feedback on your decision.

Sometimes the counselors should agree with each other, other times they offer conflicting advice, or their advice partly conflicts and partly complements each other.

However, it shouldn't be black and white morality. It shouldn't be advisor A always offers the pacifist choices, and advisor B always recommends torture and executions. Every counselor should offer different opinions in different areas with no counselor being more or less "evil" than the others, so the player has to weigh the actual advice given, and not just figure out which decision the game writer (you) are advocating as moral or immoral.

For the same reason, this is why there should be occasionally three counselors offering advice at once, so there aren't just Counselor A votes 'yes', Counselor B votes 'no'.

Counselors might give poorly-thought-out advice, but they shouldn't give stupid advice - they are people of political intrigue who came into positions of great power: speaking into the ear of the king. They had to be intelligent and patient to get here, so their advice should always seem intelligent on the surface, even if it's flawed when thought out. They should, when speaking their opinions to the player, be passionate and convincing. Then, the player actually has to make a choice.

Also give the player the ability for you to execute, exile, imprison, or fire counselors and replace them with another counselor (from a pool of twenty-thirty or so).

The Bible records a couple great scenes of political decisions in the courts of emperors or kings. These are events that actually historically occurred, almost word-for-word, though also sometimes paraphrased and alot of the back-and-forth dialog missing.

One of these scenes is Rehoboam (the son of King Solomon), and how his stupid decision to ignore all his father's counselors' advice actually caused the nation of Israel to be split in two: into Israel (the northern kingdom) and Judah (the southern kingdom). You can find the scene in: "1st Kings", chapter 12, verses 1 through 24

The entire books of 1st and 2nd Samuel, 1st and 2nd Chronicles (after skipping the first dozen chapters, which are lists of lineages), and 1st and 2nd Kings have some court dialog and scenes intermixed in between wars and other things. How David reacts (against the advice of his counselors) when his son Absalom tries to seize the throne, and later when his son Adonijah assumes kingship, and David has to rush to put Solomon on the throne (1st Kings chapter 1). David's interactions with King Saul before David became king, are interesting.

Ezra, Nehemiah (cup-bearer to king Artaxerxes), have some interactions with the king of Persia.

Daniel have some court scenes between Daniel and the emperor of Babylon and (later) the Media-persians Darius and Cyrus the Great. The book of Esther also has some court scenes between Esther (the Queen), Mordecai (her adopted father), the king (likely Xerxes 1), and Haman (the king's advisor who hates Mordecai).

Other scenes with emperors or kings in the old testament include Joseph's interactions with Pharoah. (Genesis 41 and later, though Joseph's story begins in Genesis 37)

What if audiences had "time limits" to them? Suppose the player sees a brief synopsis of the people requesting audiences and the reasons, limited to say, 12 audiences visible to the player each turn (so as to not overwhelm the player):

General Reng | War Effort | Requests more resources

Habil De`ack | Society | Average public health is gradually declining

Admiral Talia | War Effort | Requests permission to invade a neutral nation

Lieutenant Thompson | War Effort | Report on the Fourth Fleet on the northern front

High Engineer Vernes | Production | Report on ship production of the new ship designs

Treasurer Francis | Administration | Warning about dwindling treasury funds

...

The player only has "time" for 5 audiences a turn, so chooses 5 out of those 12 synopses, (granting 5 audiences out of the 12 people waiting) and gets the fuller text (limited to a paragraph), and the counselor opinions (limited to two sentences each, max 3 opinions).

Some of the audiences have a time-limit. Invading the neutral nation might be relevant for 3 turns. Most audiences only have a 1 turn time limit, but super-important choices may have 2 or 3 turn limit (the petition will show up for 2 or 3 days in a row hoping you'll choose him from amongst that day's 12 petitioners). After the time limit (usually just 1 turn), the petition is auto-resolved. If a decision needs to be made, it'll automatically be made (perhaps a random choice from the possible options that would've been presented to the player). If it's a warning or a report, it'll just be dropped from the queue.

Further, it'd be nice if on turn 5, Admiral Talia requested permission to invade the neutral nation, and on turn 7 he returned to report on how it went, to provide a sense of continuity.

If you have 200 turns, reduce the number of audiences the player can accept in a single turn (3 audiences?), and decrease the number of possible presented audiences (7 presented?), and increase the number of turns each audience is active for (2 turns instead of 1, even for normal audiences). Every turn the player has a second opportunity to respond or review someone's petition that he didn't have time to get to yesterday, or he can have an audience with one of the three new people requesting audiences that filled the hole left by the three he responded to yesterday.

7 possible audiences, each lasting 2 turns, over 200 turns, is 700 unique events, plus say, 300 more resulting from optional choices. 1000 total, maybe 1200 (less, when you count audiences that persist for longer than 2 turns). At two paragraphs of text apiece (one paragraph for the description, and two sentences per counselor with only 1-3 counselors commenting on it), you could probably two or three events together a day in your free time as a creative break while programming, and on days focused on content-creation, you could probably make a decent event every 15 minutes or so, with maybe 20 done as a day's work, if you make it easy on yourself by making it simple to create new events. Since the unique content sounds primarily text-related (people talking to you, you responding, the result possibly shown later), you really could create alot of unique content quickly, and even recruit a friend or sibling to help - it's not a technical thing they have to learn, they just have to be a good writer.

Alot of the report-type events would mostly be procedurally generated anyway. "Your majesty, we now have %ship_count% ships in %area%.", repeated once every 20 turns is 10 audiences, and zero creativity required in writing. Most of the report-type audiences would be similar. "My lord, %mineral-type% harvesting is now at %harvest-capacity%. Your humble servant the head foreman sends his regards.". Though you'll probably want two or three stock variations for those report-templates that are repeated alot, you still cut down your "unique events" a great deal. The easier you make it on yourself to create the unique content, the more you can create. It'll be the choice-giving audiences (petitions rather than reports) that provide the most creative challenge, but even so, 20 minutes every now and then during programming breaks could probably get you two or three of them done a day.

Or maybe I'm just completely mis-estimating the requirements, or the nature of the game.

it would be nice if some events/audiences gave you the option to send one of your advisors to solve the problem, removing his/her advice(/options) from audiences for X turns.
(aka you can send your general to solve a rebellion, but then you wouldn't be getting his/her (good) advice on combat-related activities for say 3-5 turns

i recommend against taking focus-points to the next turn, btw, since focus-points feel like available time, and bringing time to your next turn would break immersion.
if you want a resource you can "gather" i 'd use favours, important people, usually independent, owing you a favour for granting them this or that,

apart from having some "buffer" in times of crisis, this could also make the player think about how getting the most out of these favours, aka when to collect them.

Instead of a fixed number I was thinking about "focus points" that you can accumulate and manage a bit (resource). You can have max 15 focus points, you get +5 per turn and can use them anytime (this would not force the player to deal with audiences every single turn which might be more convenient/fun).

That does seem like it'd make better gameplay, as long as there is an upper cap of focus points (the suggested 15 max sounds good).
You could then even have certain audiences take 2 focus points on rare occasions.

Representation of the throne room (audiences interface)
I have a trouble with that one and need advice.
Generally, I want a picture of an imperial throne and siome guards on the audience screen, that's very climatic. Then there needs to be an overview of people/audience requests. I think I can fit 2 rows of 6 each if I make it small (check the first picture, it's for another part of the game, but overall direction of the UI should be the same http://www.gamedev.net/topic/643014-personnel-strategy/ ) but I'm not sure if that's enough size to fit any info.
...
The audience petitions would need some quick button to "deny" it, for quick disposal.

Here's a possible layout:

(Note: the thrones I just stole from Google Images as placeholders - they are almost certainly copyrighted)

You could even color-code each audience box based off of department category (blue = civil service, green = military, white = science, etc...).

Hmmm, indeed horizontal audience cards can fit reasonable amount of text.

About grant audience button, maybe fit there a list of possible choices as well? It's kind of repetitive to first click grant audience and then a new screen/window pop up and asks which option you choose...

I wonder about the throne picture, somehow I find it annoying... Maybe it's because of the black background and it should be inside a border+background (as a big picture at the top?) Or maybe drazw this throne as a screen background and it will become fully visible after you get rid (deny or grant) of the audiences for the turn?