I have lost track of the number of times people have said this very thing. I have a two part question:

1) where do you draw the line as a designer between players complaining that "this power doesn't work the way I think it should" and clear decision that the designer is going to stick with what they decided? What do you do when you sincerely believe that the design decision is a correct one, and that people who play the designed game are not used to puzzle solving games/ rogue like games where you don't know how things work until you figure it out? Have we lost an era of gaming where people don't like under the hood mechanics (I don't mean not moddable, just that hard numbers don't some into normal gameplay)

2) If you had an alternate ability available, defensive in nature, that was meant for a swift attacker rather than a slow, methodical one, what would it be ?

I have to agree with EstyleS.

This has nothing to do with it. After the first time I used it, I perfectly understood how it works. It's not complicated. There's nothing puzzle or rogue-like about it. It's just almost useless as it is.

My alternate ability would be exactly what I said: the defensive bonus lasts until the defender moves again. (It could be negated if defendee moves instead of staying put and attacking/casting, as mentioned above.) Then the ability would be useful. As it is now it's a waste of a skill point.

How often do you use this ability?

I'll admit this ability is bit quirky, but I agree with Azunai... it won't work if you try to make Guard stay in effect until the Defender's next turn; otherwise, you'd be giving your guys +30 defence and letting them attack and keeping the +30 defence even after they attacked.  Then we'd have to read a "Guard is OP'ed!!!!" post and I do not want to read another <Fill-in-the-Blank> is OP'ed!!!! post.

Those are all fair points. From my limited experience, though, it was basically pointless. Let me explain:

I got Mausolus (or however you spell it) pretty early on and he came with it. Just about every battle I had with his army I'd try to use the ability. It would go: Mousolus is up; look at initiative list; nope, my spearmen/assassin/everyone else attack before the enemy; do something else. I think I successfully used it once throughout the entire game. I'll fully grant that I wasn't optimizing around it, but the other hero in that army was using Eviscerate constantly so it felt a bit lackluster.

It felt like the defender+assassin partnership should have been perfect, but instead it was the assassin doing all the work and taking all the damage and poor little Mausy plinking away for 5-10 damage per turn.

I think I'm starting to come around on this ability. I still think it should last until the defender's next turn, but agree that units shouldn't retain the bonus if they move. Maybe have the defender fortify the tiles, instead of the units?

But I'll agree that it would have been more useful if I'd had a different style army. I had some rabbits and some turtles, and the rabbits moved frequently enough that the ability was quite impractical. And the enemy (rightfully) would prioritize the rabbits as targets. If I'd had turtles and archers (not sure what those are in the animal analogy) it would probably have been better.

I still think the ability might not be as useful as it should be in more heavily turtle-oriented armies. It would still only work if the correct enemy struck between your defender's move and your turtles' moves.

(Finally I will note that Mausolus starts with this ability so I did not "choose" it, but hey, can't complain about a free hero.)

I think the main thing I'm having with this ability is that it would be so awesome in the right circumstance and I'm frustrated that this circumstance never appeared for me.

Well I think once you've defined what animals are what they help, as shorthand.

True, but as long as we're changing things in imaginary land we might as well make that bonus only apply to friendly units.

That would be a far more clever use of haste than I'd ever be able to pull off. I think the problem is that when you're using this ability, all of a sudden what you want to happen is inverted: normally you want to always go faster, faster, and before the enemy, but now you want to slow down and let the enemy go first. As a general mechanic this can certainly be great when done right, but I'm not sure this is the case.

I think this is what I was missing--you really should apply it to other slow-moving units. It still seems a somewhat limited use case as it's really finicky about whether your hero goes before or after your other troops, etc. I just think that's not something that's fun to have to manipulate. Faster or heavier than enemies, sure, definitely that's a good tradeoff. Faster or slower than your allies? Not so much. (Also, are there troops with that ability? I can't imagine having more than one defender with that ability in an army.)

Anyway, I've now put way too much thought into this.

Eh, agree to disagree I suppose, but when I saw this complaint first (unlike Glowing_Ember, I have kept count - 3 times so far), after playing the game, it was the farthest thing from my mind that this could be working as intended.  It just doesn't make any sense to me.

Would it be overpowered for a unit to be able to attack and keep its defense bonus?  I don't think so.  You say that otherwise the Defender would just be pinging away for 5 damage, so since he might as well do nothing anyway, it doesn't waste his attack.  But that's because he's built to give up offensive power in exchange for defending others.  You could have built a strong offensive hero, but instead you built a defensive hero - instead of attacking with him, you give up his attack in order to defend another unit.  That defense boost should last until he gets a chance to act again.  You might say, "well, he can defend more than one unit", but usually only one of those units gets attacked anyway, and the slight chance to be more useful than just defending the one who gets attacked is offset by defensive play being generally inferior to offensive.  If you had built an offensive champion, he'd just destroy an enemy unit that thus wouldn't get to attack.  When you build a defensive one, you hope to reduce the damage done by the enemy's attacks - as long as they don't have elemental damage.  If half of the time your defensive champion is unable to do either one, that seems like a problem.

"You can't defend a unit that moves too fast?"  I still don't get this one.  You'd think that a defender would be more interested in defending weaker units, who tend to have a higher initiative, rather than slow units, who are usually slow because they're wearing a lot of armor.  Even if the buff only lasted until the unit attacked or moved away, it would be more useful, because you could defend a unit that was drinking a potion or also trying to defend themselves.  "Don't worry, I'll protect you..."  *thwack* "Hey what happened?"  "Sorry, you moved your shield slightly.  I didn't know how to continue to protect you."  Even if you are using it to defend a slow unit, you have to play the weird game of matching initiative levels and hoping for the monsters to fall in between your units - the initiative mechanic is just an abstraction of weapon speed, it just feels wrong for there to be too much emphasis on the additional subgame of playing the order (going first, going more often, trying to wear lighter equipment to get better initiative - all makes sense; trying to move slower to keep buffs from wearing off - breaks immersion for me).

I suppose I could mod it to work for 2 of the defendee's turns, but that's not really how it should work either.  It should work until the defender stops defending or until the unit moves away, and I don't think you can mod that (although maybe adding a defense bonus to the square for a turn would work, like someone mentioned above).  Also, I'm not sure if allowing it to work for two turns would allow it to be stacked (you can't re-apply the effect to just one unit, but if there is one unit in the AoE that has the buff and one unit that doesn't have the buff, you can apply it - don't know what happens to the one that was already buffed, though I'm assuming it doesn't stack)...

Yeah, I get this, but without any sort of aggro mechanic (and generally I find aggro mechanics debatable at best) there's no reason to attack a defender. Sure there are a couple situations where he can block off access to archers/mages, but if you rely on melee damage at all (and I think probably 75% of the time you will) then the enemy can hit those melee'ers without worrying about the defender, because said melee unit is already adjacent to the enemy. I could understand tying down one particular enemy while the rest of your army circles round to hit others, but that's also a pretty rare case. (Contrast with warrior, assassin, mage, who are guaranteed to be useful in every battle (excepting the occasional magic-immune/physical-immune etc).)