In the german rules there is a rule change about the defend order:

The german rules say that the defend order is discarded in the next regrouping phase or when executing it.

Some people say that this is a rule clarification for making this game more fast and aggressive because that would be the spirit of the game.

I quess you're writing about guard tokens, not orders (Defend).

If I remember well:

- token is usually removed if there is a battle where you use one of them OR when the area is no longer under control of the same player (i.e. when it becomes empty or enemy)

- Defend order may be used only once per turn

- there are much more tokens than 6, so that game designers predicted that a single player may need more than one guard token

- health bonus from tokens doesn't stack with any other health bonus (even with those for heroes or with bonuses from standard Combat cards), however, you are free to choose in each skirmish if you want to use +2 health from used token or, possibly, higher bonus from all other cards

Due to all reasons above I don't think that making guard tokens weaker is necessary. With the rule from a that version of the instruction book, the player is just forced to play this order every round, if he really wants to use the bonus from the token. How can this make the game "faster and more aggressive" if players in result have much less orders per round? It's just an attempt of kicking out the most defensive strategies from the game.

But this won't help - some positions are just too good not to defend them at all costs. 

That seems very logical and well thought about.

Thanx very much!!

Dogma79 said:

I was wondering about this difference in the german vs. the original rules and contacted the german publisher. They answered, that they discussed the change of rules with the designer. So due to the german rule the guard token would be removed in the regrouping phase. so only one guard token per faction would be possible on the board per round.

I did not play enough games to judge about the consequenses and I guess we will try out both rules to look what is more suiteble for our gamestyle.

additional question to owners of the german rules/game: how do you deal with the overmind leadership card? obviously there is a great difference to the english version (german: 4 zerglings at start, english 1 zergling) I did not get an answer to that problem......