Why do so many people want Franco as a leader. He was an absolute despot and not good at anything but staying out of WWII.
WARNING! HISTORY DETOUR!
If I am not mistaken, he offered to get in but was politely turned down by the germans, who feared the opening of another front which would have further sapped their resources without any strategical advantage - France only lasted a small number of weeks anyway.
Moreover, I still hold the opinion that he was a small fry, overlooked by the Powers That Be for hotter and more pressing matters: WW2, Cold War.
If you check a map of the Mediterranean in the 60ties, you could see how most countries were dictatorships of some sort. Nobody cared. Or, to be more cynical, the right-left leaning of the dictatorships demarcated the USA-CCCP spheres of influence:
- Spain (fascist dictatorship)
- Portugal (fascist dictatorship)
- Turkey (frequent army intervention)
- Greece (fascist dictatorship)
- Jugoslavia (socialist dictatorship)
- Albania (socialist dictatorship)
- Algeria (socialist dictatorship mired in independence, civil and religious wars)
- Libya (socialist dictatorship with a taste for international terrorism)
- Egypt (socialist dictatorship)
- Israel (uh... socialist pro-US democracy mired in a nationalistic colonial preemptive war?)
- Lebanon (not yet in civil war but getting there, thanks to the 6-days-war refugees intake)
- Sirya (fascist dictatorship - actually the Baath party, an arab clone of the Nazi party who had a twin in Iraq, before someone "liberated" the latter)
- Italy was a sort of strange exception, a defeated enemy turned vassal under the (in)direct control of the US: usually the Americans support friendly fascist dictatorships, but they would not do that in Italy because, well, the country invented the concept and fought against them. So they went for democracy, kept in check from turning too right or left by a strategy of terrorism: 20 years of random bombings from far-left and far-right groups left the powers in the hand of basically one moderate, pro-US and deeply corrupt party.
- France... well, France was a democracy with a General in charge, getting nookilar weapons of mass destruction and urging the independence of Free Quebec. Probably with a Free Louisiana in his mind, too. As if it were not enough, in 1968 it was packed with young surrenderous cheese-eating monkeys with a liking for Mao and free sex. Pity it just got liberated recently, otherwise another round of "liberation" might have felt proper.
BACK TO GAME ISSUES
There is quite a number of brutal despots in Civ4 (Stalin anyone? What about Mr. Cultural Revolution?) so your argument against Bad Guys does not hold, sadly. On the contrary, some despots are politically correct while others are not. Apparently, joining a war and siding with the winner helps winning "correctness" points.
I would say that Franco is not there exactly because he did NOT join the Second World War on the good side. Joining on the bad side means that, in free strategy games, history pretends you never existed.
On the other side, if you need a clearly evil supervillain for a shoot-em-all game, then what is better than a zombie cyborg clone of the austrian Weird Hairdo?
when you mention Heuss or Adenauer. ALthuogh I pretty much don't know anything about them (just that they were barely after WWII), I suppose they could make so-so choices.
