Apparently, the badges seem to be working again, at least they did for me. I was about to file a report, and the two popped up as complete again. It didn't show the shiny upgrade to the Kongpanion on the game page, but it does show it on the achievements page.
When I checked yesterday, I confirmed I had two of this game's badges. Now that it's on it's BotD day, neither badge registers as having been done, and neither reacts to anything I do now. Is something simply wrong with the site?
I apparently erased the part by mistake where it mentioned you do it by constantly buying and reselling minor potions. Anyway, the skill stops raising by 2s at 700s.
Similar to how it works for the books, if you have 300-400 or so bargaining, and a few thousand gold in your hand, you can grind your bargaining up massively, If you start at 300 with 15k gold, you could probably take it all the way up to max if you wanted to. It'll save you a ton of money/time in the long run when you get to buying skill books and home upgrades.
The one issue with the hard badge is how ridiculously luck based the beginning of the game is. If you get bad tree spawns early, you may as well immediately reset if you're playing for time.
Personally I'd say 4 lights and 1 rocket.. The 4th bounty has two tanks, and the rocket really helps deal with them. That one still went well into the orbital bombardment phase. Other than that, nothing else came close. The "stronger" units have such comically poor respawn times compared to their level of strength that all they do is hamstring the AI for being forced to use them.
I got the hard badge in one try, but I feel like 90% of the damage I took throughout the game was from things that spawned directly on top of me. Other than that, nothing in the game felt like a threat.
Making gold is much less tedious if you just spam max on llama races and close/restart the game if you're about to lose. Turned 41 into 369 in just 2-3 minutes. I think I'll continue for a few minutes longer...
Somehow I got the easy badge in one shot despite being down to my final re-deal in stage... 2. Then I promptly filled in less than half the ring in stage 7 and died.
I had the same issue with buying the Laser Gun. The Dual Teagles were holding up fine through 7 maps. I upgraded to the laser gun, and suddenly the game was unplayable. The weapon does almost no damage to anything, fires slowly, and I get instantly killed at the start of most maps.