There are two kinds of difficulty in the tournament:
1) Difficulty of winning a battle. That's directly related to the ratio between my and enemy squad size (who brings more troops, has easier time).
2) Difficulty of replacing losses. That's directly related to the size of my squad (the bigger squad, the more individual troops I need to replace after (won) battle).
I believe a lot of people don't realize how the difficulty of winning a battle in the new tournament got changed. And I believe that picture (or at least colorful table) speaks better than words. Here's an attempt for visualization of the new vs. old tournament difficulty of winning the battle. (Many many many thanks to
@MinMax Gamer for the info he provided to the comunity, the first column is copied directly from his table.)
- There are few provinces that are EASIER than EVER before - that's the green part above the first thick line. In the "old" tournament the difficulty started at around 0.85 (it could slightly differ when there were not exactly 5 squads).
- Also some higher stars are easier that the same stars in the "old" tournament. 1* reach the same difficulty in the 7th province, 2* in the 8th province, 3* also in the 8th province, 4* in the 11th province, 5* in the 13th province and 6* in the 16th province.
- But also from the break points listed just above the higher stars or the following provinces are always tougher than the same stars in the "old" tournament.
- But also by province 21 we are starting to face TOUGHER fights than EVER before. In the "old" tournament the difficulty was topped at around 1.6 ratio.
I strongly believe that the sole purpose of the rebalance is to prevent us to go to high numbered provinces every week and harvest the knowledge points in the second (and some players even in the fifth) round. I hate the dishonesty of the style in which Inno presents these changes.
Personally, when I try to distant myself from my heated emotions, I must say that spirit of the change itself does make some sense. The possibility to get huge amounts of KPs was probably hurting the game balance in the long run. Probably. The delivery of the change was awful. And I'm not persuaded, that this was the only solution or even one of the top ones.
One more personal note: I started farming the knowledge points from the second round of the tournament only this year. Why? Because the last chapters were so slow to go through! The possibility to slowly level up my wonders gave me some sense of progress. I even built several wonders I originally decided to skip. That's ironic, because that decision is what hurts me in the new tournament in the other kind of difficulty (replacing losses), lol.