It all depends where you are up to in the game, I suppose and what the losses are as a percentage of what you have to begin with.
^ This - both points - very much. Speaking as a lower-stage player who lacks advanced Troops and has very few Combat boosts, this Gems Tournament has, so far, certainly been unusually difficult for me. It seems likely, though, that this change in difficulty level may (?) not be so apparent to more advanced players - especially those who usually auto-fight - who have a much larger number of Squads and/or use various Combat boosts for some/all Tournaments (Fire Phoenixes, Brown Bears, Crafted buildings, Dwarven Armorers...), and who [probably] also lose variable numbers of Troops/Goods in the Spire each week, so that Tournament/Spire losses are less easily differentiated or estimated.
For reference, I am a primarily manual fighter of reasonable [not expert] Combat skill, at the end of the Dwarves Chapter, without any Bear, with only a 30% Level 6 Fire Phoenix boost, and, this time, with 1 x MMM building placed, although I have few Crafted buildings and I have won none in the Spire for many weeks (and only two ever, in fact, since I go no further than the first 16-20 Encounters at the most, due to [for me] the slow-but-real net Diamond loss week-on-week, and I haven't won more than one Blue Mystery Chest in any Spire instance for a long time). I did not use any boosts except the Fire Phoenix in the last Gems Tourney, so I should theoretically be doing noticeably
better in this one.
I've noticed two specific differences which seem probable factors in the overall difficulty increase which I, at least, have seen:
1. The Enemy Squads all began at 2* in Province 1, then moved up to 3* (two Troop types of the possible three) by Province 4 (!), then up to
all 3* by Province 6
of Round One, which is effectively +1 * rating at all three Provinces mentioned when compared to the
same Provinces in Round One of a 'normal' Tournament - and while on this point, I'd mention that even what I now call 'normal' Tournament difficulty is perceptibly harder than it was during the Tournaments I well remember from a year or so ago, when I never met
any 3* Enemy Squads until at least halfway through Round Two, in a former City of almost identical construction and at almost the exact same Chapter/development point;
2. The Maps have been very unfavourable in all but Provinces 11 and 14 of a possible 15. Of these bad Maps, around 1/3 have, so far, featured only
ONE exit hex for my Troops, and the other 2/3 have featured only two or three exits - notably the top and bottom hexes only, or one at the top and two at the bottom - with the Enemy Squads in most cases having
at least 4-5 unobstructed starting hexes (or, conversely and equally unfavourably, the Enemy comprising 5-8 stacks of primarily Heavy Ranged Troops, all at 3* 'debuff-capable' levels, staying put behind the same 'funnel' of obstacles with only one exit/entrance on
their side, with this making it difficult to approach them without significant losses - those 30% debuffs really do stack up, especially when the player's 5 Squads are up against more than 5 Enemy Squads, all of them with debuffing abilities).
This has, so far, led not only to the 'Troop funnelling' problem of which most manual players are aware, but also to the also-often-mentioned problem of far too many free-roaming 3* Mistwalkers [appearing most commonly in the Maps where my Troops were 'funnelled' and the Enemy Squads were not] - which have been so
very damaging this time that I've resorted to mixing 1 or even 2 Squads of Heavy Ranged (or even Heavy Melee, where there are too many 3* Enemy HR Squads) with my Mages [I have only 1* Banshees and 2* Sorceresses] in
every Encounter with even
one Mistwalker Squad [not my usual strategy], and I've also needed to Cater at least 50% earlier than usual, even Catering perhaps one-third of Round One [which I can usually fight almost 100% with few losses] and more like half of Round Two [again, which I would normally fight in around 90% or more cases without much loss]. This Map problem may well account for the unusually high and/or unexpected early and repeated losses, even higher than my own, which the [experienced] primarily auto-fighters I know in-game have been reporting in this Tourney in particular.
And [finally! I get there in the end...] to actually respond directly to your point above,
@Pauly7 - it is indeed very difficult to find an efficient Troop mix to field against multiple 3* Enemy Squads when one does not yet have access to the Mercenary Camp at all, most of the Training Grounds Troops are still unavailable, and one's only 3* Barracks Troops are Archers [in my particular case]; probably the best Elven Barracks Unit, but still, obviously of little use in Gems Tournaments, especially where 'Troop-funnelling' Maps and/or 3* debuff-capable Mistwalkers and HR Enemy Squads are commonplace. As you also mention, it is indeed difficult to produce significant numbers of Troops of
any description at my present stage, with 20-25 Squads of each Tournament's 'top two' Units being about my usual starting
maximum, with maybe 50-75% total expected losses each week [and with that final result including replacement Troops newly built during each Tournament] - although, again, this particular Tournament has been nothing short of a disaster in terms of Troop losses (even including the high percentage of Catering I've used), with ~40% of my starting ~40 Mage Squads already lost by the end of Round One and
100% of all Mage Squads lost by the end of Round Two (
including ~12 Squads made during/between Rounds), meaning that I have had no option but to use some of my saved-up Troop Instants to generate enough Squads for [advance estimate] perhaps half of Round 3. I have
never had such high % losses in
any Tournament, even Scrolls/Dust, and certainly not in Gems.
I personally dislike Troop Instants as a concept, although I have both intentionally and by random chance won several of them, since I suspected that these had started appearing in Events for a reason which would become clear soon enough, and the forthcoming changes to Tournaments (still in Beta), together with the increasing difficulty even of the existing Tournaments (and the Spire's ever-growing Squad Sizes), appear to be the rationale behind these Troop Instants being created at all. It's not a system I like in any way, since I consider Events an unreliable source of anything due to the random nature of all Event prizes, and I also find the Events themselves more and more unappealing as the prizes become less and less useful; however, it seems to me that without
any Troop Instants, which are presently 'Event-only' items (or, alternatively, a fair few Spire-sourced Time Instants - for those who don't mind spending Diamonds
*), it seems to me that it will soon become very difficult for players who tend more towards the 'casual' style of play to create enough Troops, if not aided by a consistent and useful level of boosts of various kinds, to keep pace with present and future levels of demand upon them. I remain unsure as to whether Crafted Combat boosts - my only realistic option - will still be useful (either to the same degree, or at all...?) in the new 'mixed-Enemies' Tournament setups; present indicators on this do not, sadly, seem very promising.
[* Which does not include me - as if that weren't fairly obvious by now? ]
In particular - and I do hate to harp on this, since it may appear as if I am in some way over-criticising one specific part of the playerbase, which I really am not [the situation shouldn't have arisen, but it did, and if I could have grabbed some of the inexplicable former largesse, I would have, too!] - it's certainly true that producing Troops at a rate which can match or exceed the last year's-worth of slow-but-appreciable increases which I, at least, have noticed in Combat difficulty in both Tourneys and the Spire, let alone any future ramping-up of Enemy Squad numbers and/or inherent 'difficulty-per-battle', is now a chronic problem for players without at least one Brown Bear, in particular. I have 60 x Pet Foods, and I see Pet Food in my Magic Academy
at least five times each week, too, and often even
twice or more per day, but this is of little use - and even starts to seem like overkill - when I have only one low-grade Fire Phoenix which uses maybe 2-3 Pet Foods per Tourney/Spire combined... :/