In my understanding of history, they are three very different cases.
Mao won a liberation war (against the japanese) and a civil war. Since in power, I believe he did not, willingly, plan or order mass murders and genocides. He did, however, make some spectacularly bad political/economical decisions which starved to death millions (great leap forward) and very nearly caused a second civil war (cultural revolution). The decisions which triggered these events, however, were based on more or less reasonable principles, such as "producing more steel" (by, er, turning farms into steel mills and leading to a famine) or "letting the young express their criticisms".
On the contrary, Stalin's policies led the USSR to an incredible, unprecedented growth and developement. Lenin left an agricultural, backward country. Stalin not only won WWII, but miraculously turned this country in the superpower which was to launch the first ever satellite in space in 1957 (Stalin died in 1953). However, he indeed was a mass murderer, and quite evil for that matter, since he, among many others killed *all* the revolutionaries which had been his comrades in 1917, no exception.
Now, Hitler. My point is that the guy is only to be remembered for criminal actions, defeats, and generally can be considered a complete loser. Yes, he may have done a decent job in rebuilding Germany after WW1, but, as one can see from what happened after WW2, when Germany was even more broken and recovered even faster, that was probably not that that hard a task, the country had the energy to rebuild itself alone.
Apart from that, diplomatically he was a total failure. His only ally in Europe was -hear what- ITALY! (note: I am italian) a poor, backward country at the time with an extremely weak army.
Strategically, a complete failure also. He attacked Poland thinking that England and France would not react. Wrong. He managed to keep the USSR neutral, only to attack it in 1941, as if having to fight just about everyone else was not enough. Crazy. Ok he won some partial victories out of surprise but what are they good for? In the end he was losing so bad, German cities crumbling under carpet bombings while his troops retreated and, still delusionally convinced he could win, he was not even able to surrender the country properly, as ANY decent ruler in history would have done. He sent 12 years old children to the front and eventually suicided in a bunker while the cossacks and the yankees shaked their hands over the smoking ruins of Berlin.
In the meantime he slaughtered millions of jews, and also hundreds of thousands gypsies and internal political opposers. Should he be considered a "great leader"?
To me it would be very similar to having the emperor Nero, who reportedly set fire to Rome to blame the Christians, lost wars, was paranoid, killed his own mother and eventually committed suicide, as a Roman leader. Any supporters for the idea??
!!! The game is made for everyone and I'm sure many people play as Mao now and many more as Stalin or Hitler later. This game is supposed to allow you to take historical countries and leaders and create your own place in your own custom world. If you don't like history the way it is you can go back in time and change the past like Red Alert! (Be warned changing the past will affect the future in unpredictable ways
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