It's a interesting move removing the ability to delete troops. It means if you get stuck somewhere (boxed in) you can't drop your HQ and move to greener pastures, your stuck boxed in. Additionally the leap frog tactic is nullified, some up side? Defending sectors will be tougher and it will pretty much be compulsory to open all 8 defense slots or else you'd risk loosing the sector to NPC's (you can currently manage with just 2-3 slots in most places I've noticed) not to mention other guilds. Pretty much all edges will be painful to own as would be leaving any gaps in your sectors. So in a way people are now more encouraged to wipe out NPC's rather than fight other guilds.
I'm not sold on the move but we will see in a few weeks or more I guess.
As for other changes "The event history will no longer show up during battles" I like this, would like to apply it as a toggle function to the entire game. I hate that thing poping up constantly.
Can't really comment on the GB, probably won't fit in my town anyway so I won't worry about it's usefulness.
Nice to see a bunch of big fixes, I havn't noticed too many but still nice to see a bunch of bug fixes included.