I'll agree with him. I think the mechanic is broken and makes the game worse, and we only play with the tokens now. My experience with Kingsburg and rolling the King's Assistance has basically been that it makes the same thing happen to everyone way too often. I've had way too many games where a high roll the first couple years means everybody wins and gets exactly the same rewards regardless of their soldier count, and a late low roll against a high-value monster meant basically everyone lost.

At the end of a game I played in which every single person beat the monsters in years 1-4 and not one person beat the monsters in year 5, I realized that the entire mechanics of soldiers and battle in that game had contributed nothing more than who gets a point each year from winning by the most in 1-4. For all the contribution the mechanic had to the game, we might as well have just had a deck that told us what we won or lost each year regardless of soldier number.

And while I've heard some people profess that sometimes they like to gamble on the die, I would contend that the die doesn't give you the option to gamble sometimes, it forces everyone to gamble every time. If you pass up soldiers for resources, or +battle buildings for economic or point buildings, you're gambling that either the die roll will be high or the losing penalty won't be bad. On the other hand, if you pass up on resources for soldiers or higher-point buildings for things to help in battle, you're gambling that the roll will be low to punish the people who are building a lead while you get ready for winter.

That's a pretty big decision to have to make year in and year out and stake your fortunes on a single d6 roll. With the tokens, you can still gamble if you want to, but you potentially have the option of an "oh shit" button if you're about to lose an important structure early or something like that. On the other hand, for the people who played it safer on the military end of things, they get a nice +4 point bonus at the end.