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After looking through the rulebook for Defiance, no my pledge has finally arrived, I've got a few questions not apparently raised by anyone else. Since no-one is activating my profile on the official forums, I'll ask in here...

What do the colours round the unit counters represent (green and red on character/ally counters, yellow, orange, purple and black on enemy counters)?
I assume that on character counters, green means ready to activate, red means activated this turn (and I use the red/green discs included in the game instead, when using miniatures).
On the enemy tokens, the yellow, orange and purple borders are just to distinguish different squads of the same troop type? and the plastic rings are used to show this on the miniatures? and black is for unique enemies, as you don't need to distinguish multiple copies of them at once?

What are the grey square tokens with dice symbols on them for? They look like they can be used to track stored symbols on specialty cards and the like?

And on the subject of Specialty cards, in the campaign game, how do you determine which Specialty cards a character starts with (rulebook, page 35, under "Beginning the Campaign", step 3 is "Each player takes the Specialty card of their chosen Character ..."

Finally, how does one acquire the cards in the Versatile group? They have no level listed, and aren't mentioned in the rules.

 AndrewGPaul wrote:
After looking through the rulebook for Defiance, no my pledge has finally arrived, I've got a few questions not apparently raised by anyone else. Since no-one is activating my profile on the official forums, I'll ask in here...

What do the colours round the unit counters represent (green and red on character/ally counters, yellow, orange, purple and black on enemy counters)?
I assume that on character counters, green means ready to activate, red means activated this turn (and I use the red/green discs included in the game instead, when using miniatures).
On the enemy tokens, the yellow, orange and purple borders are just to distinguish different squads of the same troop type? and the plastic rings are used to show this on the miniatures? and black is for unique enemies, as you don't need to distinguish multiple copies of them at once?

Yeah, the color groups are so that you'll have an easier time keeping track of the different squads. Because you also have to keep track of which model in a unit is 1, 2 or 3, you'll probably also want to mark the rings.

What are the grey square tokens with dice symbols on them for? They look like they can be used to track stored symbols on specialty cards and the like?

Mostly, it's so you can keep track of accumulating symbols while hacking consoles. That and for the various abilities that let you retain a symbol, like you guessed.

And on the subject of Specialty cards, in the campaign game, how do you determine which Specialty cards a character starts with (rulebook, page 35, under "Beginning the Campaign", step 3 is "Each player takes the Specialty card of their chosen Character ..."

Originally, they were going to do fancy character advancement cards, one for each character. That got replaced during production with the specialty groups charts. Unless you feel like printing those out and pasting them onto index cards, all you end up doing for that step is "Make sure you know which chart is yours."

Note that the Defiance FAQ is up to v 1.5 and includes this question/answer pair now:

Do Characters begin with Specialty cards?
They begin without Specialty cards. The First Specialty is obtained when the first mission has been completed.

Finally, how does one acquire the cards in the Versatile group? They have no level listed, and aren't mentioned in the rules.

The requirement for each character's versatile card is on the bottom of that card. That's why it's not mentioned in the rules.