Fights of 2:1 are designed for you to lose, the hardest tournament level is only 1.6:1 Difficulty is based on enemy squad size verse your squad size.Try to scout the provinces closest to your town as going an extra "ring" distance out has a big jump in enemy squad size Enemy squad sizes are effected by your advanced scout technology and distance from your city.They will not impact the squad size in battles, for this you need to research squad size technology. Armories only increase the training size in your barracks and training grounds.Sadly the combat system in chapter 2 and start of chapter 3 is unbalanced so negotiating is the way to go, but there are things to understand so you can have the option to do combat near the end of chapter 3 or in tournaments. Is this a bug, and if not, what's going on? Because I'm already finding it very difficult to explore on the world map sufficiently to get the expansions I need in order to produce enough coins to meet research unlocks, not to mention upgrade levels required for quests. The wiki also indicates that I should have started with squads of 12. Then a couple quests later, after I've gotten my first squad size upgrade, it mentions that my squad size should now be 24 - this prompted me to look things up on the wiki, since it started at 6 and went to 9, and 12 then 24 would make a LOT more sense given that the enemy squad size in the second ring of hexes is a whopping 29 and was naturally whooping my 9-man squads butts. I figure maybe the problem is that I haven't gotten around to building an armory yet. So, the the following list has some qualifications, and as wonders and techs change so will the difficulties of various tourneys.So, I meander my way through the first part of the game, trying various things out as they poke my curiosity or quests come up prompting them, the first few battles seem rather unbalanced so I resort to negotiating and using up my resources to progress, to my annoyance, but at first I figure it's probably to encourage the peaceful route, since after all I'm supposed to be elves, right? But then I get to the quests, and they indicate I should be able to initially train 12 warriors at once, instead of six. On balance, humans have a better set of troops than elves though, the balance between the 2 isn't quite right. Other examples of how things change include humans having a big advantage in gems and marble because their mages are soooo good (best troop type in game), and elves in any tourney that uses a lot of heavy ranged (golems being better than human mortars). In short, between the tech unit upgrade and the faster training grounds, planks was a fair bit easier for me this time than it was 9 weeks ago. I also finished the 3 star tech upgrade for strategists recently (often a star upgrade makes that troop type more efficient to use for a period of time). So, the last planks tourney is one where its helpful to use a lot of orc strategists. For example, in my chapter and with my wonders, my training ground is quite a lot faster than my barracks. The difficulty changes for humans\elves at different stages in the tech tree.