Need help beating game on hard

Well I guess it's a true challenge and prepares you for the online world   most of the time your team mate may suck, so the AI may actually be helping in this case.. lol

I've noticed this myself on hard difficulty. Your teammates levels will lag the oppositions levels by 2-4. So in effect you have to learn the skill of carrying the side to victory by yourself - a skill that will certainly come in handy online.

you have to realize that the computer doesn't understand the victory conditions of the different game modes. you'll sometimes get an unwinnable match if the tournament picks Slaughter Mode or Dominate (on one of the larger maps anyway). it doesn't matter how well you play personally, you can't prevent your computer allies from losing the match for you by ignoring victory conditions. 

you can either just take it as bad luck or you can kinda cheat the system and quit out of a tournament round that gives you something nearly unwinnable. it won't lose your place in the tournament so next time you start it up it will select a new random map and maybe give you something you can actually win.

Rocky_Tooth / Sevenwarlocks: That's actually a good point. Hadn't thought of it like that. I do welcome the challenege. Just seem beyond my reach. Any pointers?

Transitive: It seems that I have the most trouble withh Conquest which is the basic game and I'm assuming the normal victory condition for the AI. I'd rather avoid cheating the system and actually learn to play the game well (at least well enough to beat non human AIs).

What I've noticed is (and it might be my very frustrated imagination) is a sort of Mario Kart rubberband ai cheat. The better I play and harder I push, the worse my teammates play forcing me to backtrack.

they do suck. if you setup a 1 off game on single player Skirmish and pick Hard for your AI partners they dont suck. they're actually on hard. 

if you play the Hard mode tournament you don't get this benefit. it sets the enemy team to hard but your team is still on Normal and thus suck alot and die repeatedly. 

I recently beat Hard with Sedna. With Healing I can occasional save a team mate, use a creep wave in place of minions. (with Healing Wind to increase their durability). Heal 1, Grace 1, Wind 1, Pounce 1, Pres 1 (1 -> 5 levels)

• I use the teleport favor item to quickly cap a flag, and map depending kill some creeps for level2, the AI early on does not teleport forward, but will use it to escape. Later levels the AI will tele into battle.
  
• Sometimes I needed to lower the game speed, (minus, Plus and Asterisk - slower, faster and set zero). It gives me more time to make decisions.
  
• Buy the 1st Helm for mana regen and the building upgrade 1 with your 1,100 gold.
• Later buy Flag locks. The AI will sometimes will wait the timer out, which means upto 45 seconds they're not doing a thing.
• I like to get the wand item that has a speed burst to outrun danger.

Play Oak and make a mininion builds. Since the AI is dumb you can kill scores of AIs simultaneously. Then you win every match and come in 1st place every match.

Man that clause twisted my brain in knots.

I have nothing helpful to add.

Transitive: I guess what I'm reading here is that it simply isn't possible to win all 8 out of 8 matches.

Voxorange: Are you saying you beat all 8 out of 8 matches on Hard with Sedna or that you simply beat it?

Lord-Orion: Thanks for the tip. The problem isn't killing other demigods, it's my allies ganging up on a single opposing demigod and getting their butts handed to them.

My apologies if that wasn't clear.

The 1st gametype in tournament always seems to be Conquest and unless its small, I can't seem to win.

i've been able to beat all 8 matches on hard, but its rare and takes luck. you can make your own luck if you quit out of games that are unlikely to be winnable due to the faults of your AI allies.

i don't feel like its cheating to quit out of a slaughter mode game. the AI allies have no sense of self preservation, they don't even understand that dying will make them lose the whole match. thats way too much of a handicap to remain in the realm of fun. its one thing to fight uphill against an opponent with superior stats. its another to be forced to lose automatically because of your dumb computer allies. 

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I ended up with 7 from 8. Which included an amazing comeback from 7-9 Slaughter. And I confess a quit/reset, because my AI allies Kamikaze’d the enemy an early advantage.

Dominion is one of the easiest. You just need to be mobile. I like Sedna because Inner Grace provides HP Regen + Speed Boost. Her auto healing gives her better durability to take down towers/fortress. Not having to buy health potions is a definite positive, when the gold is very limited for the Hard setting. Still, if you have a preferred Demigod which you play well and enjoy - stay with it.

The AI is basically a jack of all trades. Which is both skill allocation/application and tactics. It does not actively pursue flags for a Dominion map, for example. It will upgrade the citadel equally across all disciplines. So, it could be argued that it wastes skill points and gold. (this of course also equally applies to your weaker allies).

The common advice is do not die. I'll compliment that by saying a visit/return to your Crystal twice is equivalent to one death. Nor can you really afford to camp a lane for the trickle of exp from creep killing. Leaving the enemy AI uncontested will allow them to out level you and your allied AI. If you have forced them to use a teleport scroll to escape, its 250g they just lost. Same principal (200g) if they are forced to use a potion. It pays to be as aggressive as possible.

I have previously suggested there should be an interim level between normal and hard. Because I felt that the difference is a major jump in play conditions.

Also, it pays to keep an attention in the scores each round. If the score between you and 2nd fiddle is close - make sure they are an ally. For my eighth game hard, I was followed by an AI Oak with a 120 point difference. I realised that if Oak was on the opposite team and I lost, I could be overtaken in the overall tally. (it turned out that Oak was an ally for the final game).

It definitely is possible to win all 8 matches on hard.  I've done it, and I've done it on Nightmare too.  I've played on Nightmare far more than I've played on Hard, so I'll be better describing Nightmare, but it should apply to Hard as well.

First, it's important to understand the situation that you're in.  In Tournament mode, your allies are always on normal difficulty, while your enemies are whatever difficulty you select.  So in Hard mode, your allies are normal, and your enemies are hard.  That is why it always feels like your allies are lagging behind you.

Also, you need to understand what an increased difficulty means: the computer is not at all smarter, they just cheat more.  The computer will get extra health, mana, experience and money.  If left to their own devices, they will eventually become nearly invincible.  Oftentimes, one of your computer enemies will suddenly become incredibly powerful, seemingly out of nowhere, and remain powerful throughout the rest of the game.

In order to defeat the computers, you'll have to get many, many more kills than they do.  In conquest mode, you'll probably want in the neighborhood of 20 kills by the time the game is done, though it's not uncommon to need more than that.  In order to get this many kills, you need to engage enemy demigods at every opportunity, especially when it is one on one, and in order to defeat them, for most characters, you'll need to use your regular auto-attacks.

You may not want to neglect your abilities completely, but the computer players will have an incredibly high amount of health and health regeneration, and I've found that it's usually very difficult to do any significant amount of damage with most abilities.  So you should focus on doing damage with your auto-attacks.  On almost every character, you'll want to take the bottom row ability, which increases your damage or your minion damage.  You'll want to be certain to purchase gloves and a favor item that increases your basic damage.  And a general, you'll want to make sure you get the highest rank idols.

For example, with Queen of Thorns, I would take the shamblers ability, all of the shamblers upgrades, and all of the minion upgrades.  I'd continue by purchasing +minion damage items and eventually artifacts that increase my damage.  When fighting, I'd always make all of my minions attack the same target as me.

With Regulus, I'd take his Wings ability (that gives him bonus auto-attack damage), mines (mines are good for both leveling and killing CPU demigods), and the bottom-row ability.  I'd purchase gloves, a mageslayer, and eventually Ashkindor.  Snipe and Mark of the Betrayer are mostly useless against a nightmare CPU.

As for strategies killing demigods, just keep in mind that the CPU is not very smart, and will follow you, sometimes at great peril.  Use your towers to your advantage: if you can't kill an enemy, see if you can't lure him into the towers.  It's also a good idea to stick with your computer allies: they'll be pretty much helpless on their own because of their lower difficulty setting.

It's also a very good idea to try to keep constant control of the artifact shop (if you're not on a map where the shop is in the enemy base).  Preventing the computers from getting artifacts is not incredibly difficult, because they won't necessarily prefer it over any other flag when they've got the money to buy an artifact, and it will actually work.

Also try to end the game early: try to buy catapultasauri as soon as you hit war rank 8, and once you've got mage slayer, go for the towers when there is no enemy demigod around.  Ending the game early is important because the enemy demigods will eventually become far more powerful than you could ever hope to become.  In Nightmare difficulty, Rook or Unclean Beast can easily become nearly invincible, and they're still rather dangerous in Hard.  If you encounter one of these super-powerful computer opponents, you should try to kill them if they push too far into your base, but otherwise it's best to leave them to wander around while you attack the other demigods and push toward the enemy citadel.

Hopefully some of this advice helped...let me know.

- Jaxian

The only difficulty I've had difficulty with winning All games at is nightmare, my ally AI just feeds the enemy too much. For hard, just keep owning the AI untill you got money for awsome artifacts!

Jaxian: Thanks a ton. Lots to digest and learn from. Glad to hear that there are folks out there who could beat the game 8/8 on hard. I'll keep yall posted on my progress once I get a chance to play again.

Jaxian: I think I have a much better understanding of what I'm up against.

If it's not terribly obvious, I posted under my brother's account and the post above is mine.

(Unfortunately he hasn't been able to play the game at all).

"I'm finding that unless the 1st map (always conquest?) isn't small like Crucible, I have zero chance of beating it because my computer controlled allies will completely drop the ball and I can't constantly baby sit all lanes. To really drive the point home, I've been in situations where 3 enemy demigods will police me on my lane while 3 of my ally demigods will theorietically clean house against the 1 on the faraway opposite lane. Except that after a few seconds the enemy demigod will get double kills.This is actually pretty common."

I don't know if this has been mentioned, but if you quit an AI match in progress and start it over, you'll get another map randomly assigned for that match(at the same place in the tourney i.e. match 1 of 8). I've had to abuse this for my own benefit to get nightmare unlocked. It works even if you wait until just before you're about to get rolled too. So in essence, you never really have to lose, although it may take forever to secure all 8 wins doing it this way.

What Jaxian says above rings true for me. The only way I get anywhere on Nightmare is playing UB. UB, properly equipped and with the right skills (oddly enough, Ooze, not Spit), is a Demigod killer. And that's what you need because your AI teammates will be doing their best to repeatedly die to enemy DGs, and the only way you can counter that is to try to keep the enemy DGs dead for as much of the game as possible.

I like UB with Ooze and a bit of armour / health regen for this because you can wade right into the midst of the enemy creeps, attack the DG who is often with them and kill both. You level fast and you give your own creeps a chance to start wailing on the enemy towers as soon as possible. Which is necessary in this because as Jaxian says, you need to get this to end game as fast as possible.

All that said, sometimes you just can't do it. I played a 3v3 on Brothers and was doing very well for quite a while - thought we'd win - and then one of the side portals got captured and our left flank just collapsed under the hordes of creeps and 2, sometimes 3, demigods that were with them. Where were my team mates? As far as I could see one was way over the side assaulting towers (unprofitably) and I've no idea where the other had got to. Got behind the enemy wave and re-captured the portal temporarily, but it was pretty much a lost cause with me trying to defend the citadel on my own. Rapidly started dying and was quickly out-levelled.

Kill the enemy DGs, quickly and repeatedly. I think that's all that will work on Conquest.