I couldn't find confirmation on this in the rules, which surprised me. If you play an army or navy to defend a province that then doesn't get attacked, I assume you remove that combat token at the end of the battle step. But I didn't see something that explicitly states that. Did I miss it? Are you meant to leave the combat token there until it's part of the battle?

If you defend a province without any attackers, the defending unit is still removed at the end of the Resolve Battle phase. I don’t think this is explicitly called out.

Not explicitly stated, but page 10 mentions that if you placed units to defend a province and it is not attacked the province is considered successfully defended, which is one result of a battle. So from that I think it’s fair to say in this situation you gain a defense bonus and still discard the combat token(s) involved.

Successfully defending a province counts as a token being resolved. All resolved tokens are removed.

The Imperial Chroniclers

On 12/15/2017 at 3:40 AM, TheSpitfired said:

Not explicitly stated, but page 10 mentions that if you placed units to defend a province and it is not attacked the province is considered successfully defended, which is one result of a battle. So from that I think it’s fair to say in this situation you gain a defense bonus and still discard the combat token(s) involved.

This was asked over on the BGG forums as well, and the consensus was precisely this. Not to mention that this was the answer provided by Tom Jolly in the thread as well.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1901772/cleaning-combat-tokens-defense

10 hours ago, puntspeedchunk said:

This was asked over on the BGG forums as well, and the consensus was precisely this. Not to mention that this was the answer provided by Tom Jolly in the thread as well.

https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/1901772/cleaning-combat-tokens-defense

Ha, same user name on both sites. Technically this is a double post!

Curious that Tom Jolly actually answered. FFG has some policies that request designers and developers don’t do that, unless Jolly doesn’t work directly for FFG. Not complaining though, cool that he answered!

Consistently defending your Provinces is a viable win tactic, but the Raid token will still wipe all those control tokens away along with their extra honor.