Is "hard" mode designed to be played with full unlocks?

[Baron Slopbane]

Played first run on normal and cleared, game seemed extremely easy.

Switched to the next faction (you have a belfry) and bumped the game up to hard and it seems impossible regardless of strategy. Do you basically need to clear normal with each faction before moving to hard so you have the extra resources, or am I missing something with the strategy? I mean, you don't even start with any military units.... I tried rushing belfry upgrades and skipping battles but even a level 6 belfry full military doesn't stand a chance against the boss.

[Kaysoky]

I believe you are expected to have at least some of the faction's specific quests finished before you bump up the difficulty. But it isn't impossible to play higher difficulties beforehand.

However in your case, the Republic is a slow-burn faction that tends to have military trouble in the early game. So you likely had this experience since you took two difficulty modifiers at once (unfamiliar faction + higher difficulty).

[Lord_Eol]

What Kaysoky said. The game expects you to unlock all the faction initial specials on normal before diving in hard, not required, just the normal play pattern expectation hence why the game doesn't force it. Just like Extreme and Nightmare generally expect you to have unlocked the full tech tree first.

Generally beat entire game with every faction individually on normal, then rinse/repeat on hard, then extreme, then nightmare.