Then you sound just like. Except that you like the special missions, of course. :)

That reminds me that I hate the timed special missions even in Carmageddon 2 too. I wish all the levels would be just about destroying all the enemy cars and killing a few pedestrians.

Heheh :-)

Ah. Then you're definitely gonna hate some of the Terran missions. But as the game let's you select the difficulty for the missions, you can at least breeze through the ones you hate :-)

I really love how they realized this in Dawn of War 2. There's a massive, system-wide infestation of Tyrannids (They're what Blizzard took from WH40k universe and called it 'zerg' - it's fundamentally the same race,) and with every mission you do - it doesn't matter whether it's a side-mission, or a 'main' mission - it takes you one day, and during that day, infestation of every planet in the system increases. You can actually do side-missions and capture certain points to decrease infestation (however, if you choose to capture the point, an installation to be more precise, you will lose access to another installation that might help you in another fashion,) and based on how well you do in missions, you can get another deployment (the game keeps track of stats like kills, time taken to complete mission, losses - basically, if you stomp your enemy into the ground, you get one or even two more mission per day.)

Basically, the game constantly keeps you under pressure, whatever you do. I would just really love the infestation to have bigger effect than difficulty of missions on infested planets.

Wow, come to think of it, maybe it is indeed a good think it has different difficulty levels. It lets me basically skip missions I don't like.

I think I can sympathize with you but I've learned throughout my gaming career that this is a problem with ME, not with THE GAME.
If you can't handle the highest difficulty setting - too fricken bad. Either get better or tone it down. I've beaten the entire campaign on Brutal without reloading even a single time in any mission and it was a thrilling and rewarding experience. Note - I'm far from being an experienced RTS player, so the game is definitely reasonable.
Then again - do NOT aim for achievements if you chose the highest difficulty. Just try to get things done ;P.

Well implemented difficulty levels are a step forward for gaming, not a step backward. I sense you already agree with that. I'm just here to beat the drum of "we realized that old way sucked and have since changed it."

Counter-intuitively, I've posted my comment mostly because I knew how this compulsion feels like, not to praise the distinct difficulty settings of SC2.
For instance - one of the reasons I've never beaten Fallout 2 was because I've tuned up everything all the way to 11, with difficulty on hard, combat on brutal and - back in the day - no previous experience of the game, the series or even too many hardcore RPGs. I've tried to take things slowly, "overstayed my welcome" and ended up with weapons so crappy and opponents so powerful that only a critical hit on an aimed shot to the eyes did any damage - a single point. After kiting for half an hour and exhausting all ammunition in my carried guns, I chose to ragequit instead lowering the difficulty (or even restarting at a more suitable one). That's why I've flipped when I read "I defaulted to Brutal and if I can't beat that - it's the designers fault, 'cause I won't tone it down, because that would feel like cheating". Experience talking.