While it's not very well documented, Strike Force's difficulty options actually changed the missions slightly.
How much depends on the mission (Most of the missions are honestly pretty just changed in damage/health values) but some missions actually saw some decent changes such as:
The defense mission "White Alamo" goes from 3 boxes of 2 mines each (Easy) to only 1 box (Unlockable Commando difficulty) of mines. (Meaning you have to destroy at least one of the armored vehicles yourself with Panzerfausts as there's no longer enough mines to destroy them all and in general the combat heavy defensive levels have less pickups for grenades.)
The Spy loses his starting PPK in a few levels and there's generally less ammo for the PPK laying around, for "Trapped" and "The Wolf's Den", this actually changes the level decently as the Spy no longer gets the PPK at all in Trapped meaning you're reliant on his garrote for stealth kills. (Replaced with a Luger on Hard but no sidearm at all on Commando until you take a Luger from a dead enemy.) and in The Wolf's Den the one PPK mid-level that you normally use as an ammo pick-up is now the only PPK you get.
The level "Cat's Eyes" on lower difficulties has a (how long depends on difficulty) alarm timer if you get spotted in the stealth section, allowing you to either kill the enemy that spotted you before he alerts the rest of the map or rush for the enemy radio station and take it over as the Spy before they manage to radio for help and fail the mission however Commando difficulty removes this timer, turning this part of the mission into complete stealth as getting spotted at all will fail the mission. (Outside of when the Spy is in the radio area just before going to the action-heavy part of the mission.)
While not alot, I would love to see the actual RTS games adopt this mindset towards difficulty settings and expand on it:
Such as more armored vehicles you have to deal with in certain missions like if the Stalingrad mission in C3 got additional enemy tanks you had to deal with.
Reducing the amount of resources available such as less grenades to wipe out groups of enemies, less poison for the Spy's syringe and less sniper rifle ammo.
C2 already lightly did this but to my knowledge mostly the difficulty levels did was just add additional regular enemies (which Strike Force also did), it never went as far as reducing your available resources or adding enemies that were more than just ordinary soldiers.
