I read all SO questions about this issue, and I still can't resolve it.

I am using TortoiseHg. I worked on a side-branch, and now I want to merge it back to the main branch. I pulled all changes made in both branches, updated to the main branch, and merged (and committed). But still when I try to push all this, I get the "abort:push creates new remote head" message. 

I also tried (as was suggested in one of the questions in SO) to close the branch using the `--close-branch` option. 

The only thing I did not try is to 'force' push. 
Any suggestions? Or is force-pushing the only option? 

![See screenshot](https://i.stack.imgur.com/41ODX.jpg)