replacing secretary / advisor?

[misterprimus]

Is it possible to replace these two? I can relieve them, but I don't get the option to pick my replacement.

[Soar_Slitherine]

The secretary position will always be filled automatically. If you dismiss an advisor, you should get a decision next turn asking you to pick someone for the spot, like usual.

[Madeofmeat]

I'm certain I have successfully chosen a replacement Advisor before, are you sure that's happening for Advisor?

For Secretary though, the game does assign a character on its own. I think it creates a new unaligned character each time.

[zgrssd]

Both can be Relieved, as normal.

The game is very agressive with refilling the Secretary Position - it is one that should never be empty.

Advisors are treated like any other council member, except their number growns with Empire Size.
However there used to be a bug where the Post kinda vanished with the releiving, until getting a new Adivsor slot reset it.

[BlueTemplar]

For Secretary though, the game does assign a character on its own. I think it creates a new unaligned character each time.

Only if you have no one in the reserve pool, otherwise it will pick someone from there (even aligned to a Faction).
And thankfully, since the Secretary seems to be responsible for rolling Covert Ops checks for foreign spies (at least until you have a Secret Service Director ?), which should be important in MP games... though for some reason the leader won't try to improve that skill himself ??

[deMangler]

On a related note - I have tried everything to try to reduce or prevent my secretaries forever creating incidents that result in some quite negative results. I have tried giving them medals and aligning profiles etc, etc, etc, I always end up relieving them out of sheer frustration but their replacements are usually no better.
I have rarely had a good one, and then I cannot see what the difference is.

[Zanotirn]

Secretary is not a high prestige job and its relation does not include factors like soldier morale or population happiness that can pull up the relations of governors or OHQ commanders. If your secretary doesn't fit ideologically, there's little to prevent the relation sliding down. Though setting higher salary can help a bit.