That hard badge is pretty easy... 3 mages, and infront of them, 5 knight guys. Upgrade mage health 1 time for each, and chain 1 time for each. Spend the last point on your middle knight's health (useful in the game 'hero')
This would be good, but i think the green planes are far over used and are too good, they can strafe you before you can kill even 2 of them, and thats just 1 type of enemy, with all the others in there, it makes the game a head ache.
COT 5 is pretty easy (once you actually get the hang of it.) Use Cenaur, Which, Mermaid, Goblin, Zombies and Dwarfs, along with small metior, phoenix strike, heal, lightning bolt, and ice shads.
Get your army up to full strength (by using small metior to kill those bomb men things,) then full on attack (sending Zombies out first to take the hits,) when the goblin is set off, hit him with everything (i iced him first, then called in the Phoenix strike, then thundered him, then metiored him and then healed, and just kept metioring.) He just gets knocked back tonnes, and all the ranged things hit the castle while the goblins take all the casulaties, with some zombies in there. Eventually the castle is destroyed.
I think that visually, this game is way worse them the first. Game play wise, it is hard, especially on levels when you dont have a tower to start with. I also think that the starting upgrades are mostly crap. And my last comment on it is, that i think that the time a gem takes to get into a tower takes too long.
Last level easy win: 1) Put disc blade launcher in square 5 (the middle one) 2) Get a damage buffer, put it as far back as possible 3) get as many barier decoys as there are remaining squares. 4) put enough points into buffer health to give it 195 health, then spend them on buffering ability 5) Fully upgrade disc blade launcher's reload and give it enough damage points (combined with the buffer) to get it to 16 damage, then put all the remaining points in health. 6) completly crush the last map =D
This also work everywhere else, though i usually dont have a damage buffer.