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.

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.

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.

Man that clause twisted my brain in knots.

I have nothing helpful to add.

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. 

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

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.

"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.