"When you assign combat damage to this zone, you may place any number of that combat damage on thisquest instead."

Given that zone = quest / kingdom / battlefield, so does this mean that I must first assign enough damage to defending units before I can place damage tokens on these new quest?

Alternatively, since the wording is not "assign combat damage to this capital section", perhaps I can ignore the defenders and treat the defender as "this zone" and skip the defenders to assign damage on those quest directly?

Either way, there needs to be a clear distinction on zone and capital section.Either zone = capital section, or zone comprises of units, support, development, quest AND capital section, making capital section a subset of zone.

Please help

Capital section is an outdated way of saying zone, it has never meant "the zone and/or units in it". You can only put damage on the mission quests that you could have assigned to the zone, so only damage left over after you've tried to destroy all defenders.

Thanks for the swift clarification!

Just to clarify, do you have to have a unit on mission cards for them to be active? In other words, does it function like a normal quest?

Nope:

Thank you, Virgo.

I thought that FAQ ruling only referred to quests where units had been removed from the quest by some means.

Another question: Could you place a unit on the mission quest? How would that work?

It won't, they are in opponent's zone (so you can't place a unit on them) under your control (so opponent can't place units on them either).

Thanks, again. Beyond the FAQ, was there ever any place that explicitly explained how Mission Quests work? A rules insert or somethng? My understanding of the rules was a quest had to have a unit on it for it to be active. Or is the FAQ the only place it was ever explained?