I gave up trying to win the Ralari mission. It's not essential to winning the game, so losing the mission doesn't matter. Just wait until you're playing Secret Missions, and random pilots come up KIA on the chalkboard due to some bug in the game. Try flying the Dralthi missions (Corsair C series) in Secret Missions 2 all by your lonesome because of a game bug. I didn't know how to make that "fixer" program work, so I just flew the missions solo instead of with Angel (or was it supposed to be Iceman? I don't remember). Many, many keyboard bangingly frustrating nights, those were.
What really chaps MY hide is that I had to cheat in order to win the final mission in WC2: Special Operations 2. I played that mission over 40 times before I lost count. Never won it on my own merits. Winning that mission is tied to winning the game on the winning path instead of finishing the game on the losing path, which is ridiculous. It still makes me angry just thinking about it.
I don't expect every mission to be easy, but shoot, to make something so hard that the average player plays the mission more times than you can call "sane" or "reasonable," and still can't beat it is wrong. No biggie if the mission isn't tied to winning the game, giving the player a second chance to fight his or her way back to the top is a good challenge. Though, to make the ridiculously hard mission the last one in the game seems like someone decided to say: "Let's do something to really fuck with people. This ought to make them really mad!"
Of course, I hate cheating. I bristle at the thought of lowering the difficulty setting from Ace to Veteran in WC3 just to pass a mission. So far I haven't had to.