I also had my difficulty set to 1.0 and the first time I went after a 500 gold coin treasure I was met with Level 160 Army of the D! I kept trying this over and over increasing the number of pigs I was using. Finally gave up. I now have difficulty set to 0.8 and my bear, lion and tiger combo can usually defeat the AotD defending 500 gold coin treasures. But this setting is a mixed bag of tricks. If you want to find high level animals to tame then you need to increase the difficulty setting. Increase it too much and all of the rampaging lions and tigers just eat you up :-).