Generals and Zero Hour has auto-generated saves for the start of a mission. There's something I discovered sometime ago in Red Alert 2: The auto-generated saves never change the RNG value or difficulty, only restarting the mission does.

I was wondering if Generals and Zero Hour may suffer from the same issue. If so, it might be better to start ILs from restarting the mission rather than using the provided save files. Needs to be looked into.

I think restarting is needed in order to reset the difficulty. The run I just submitted used a newly generated save under Easy difficulty so it wasn't an issued though.