Ed: If you read the comments below I think we'd all want an alternative to flying (i.e.: road/water transport), but that should also include the risk of ambushes, etc.

Sounds like a long-term interesting mechanic!

Twisted Kangaroo: I love that and it is missing in most games of this genre...

Basically sending a convoy off with some soldiers/vehicles/mutogs/etc. and they may get attacked on the way. If they have to travel over water then they most definitely should get attacked, probably more than once if this is even possible to do safely at all!

Ragnarok700: I agree. If we're going to have extra mechanics make different kinds of fights and scenarios. Like get the loot and leave or destroy a "captain" or lead Pandora to be able to escape something like that

Twisted Kangaroo: Yeah! That would be totally awesome! Sometimes I feel like this game is a rough sketch or draft of a real one, with most of the cool features on the periphery or still to be added... It is difficult to remember it was made by like only 8 devs or something ridiculously small like that!

ThePlayerOvGames: I've had vehicles appear in small rooms that are only accessible via ladder from above - completely useless for base defense.

Yokes: How do they get there at the moment? I can fly a fully laden aircraft to the haven and recruit someone and they apparently teleport to the base, because they're already there when the plane arrives so whatever they used, it was faster than that...

Do it old school XCOM. They arrive by foot, horseback, pogo stick, whatever... There's a distance based delay in them arriving and a risk of them not arriving at all. More so if their route is long, takes them over/through hostiles etc. Faster pickup by dispatching a spare aircraft or one of your automated taxis (neat idea).

Steve Crook: To me, this sounds perfect. Including the possible hazards that could happen along the way (though they should be very rare, maybe as an options setting or a difficulty thing?).

The faster and safer choice would be to pick them up yourself, but now you have the option to send them to any base with a small cost / risk.

Yokes: But wouldn't these fast and automated transport ships in the end act similarly as to what Steve Crook suggests? Just with possibly more micro management?

I do like the thought of finding abandoned aircrafts though, maybe as a chance mission or (more likely) abandoned in a discovered PP base.

Leimboy: not really. In my case you first need to construct them. So you need to include them in your manufacturing queue (so additional cost and time). Then you still have limited amount of them so you need to decide where they will fly to pickup recruits.

And I don't like idea of sending recruits with a risk of loosing them (we have just paid for them and we get nothing after all?)

Steve Crook they teleport in some way - thing that should be changed.

Yokes: I see, but I still think this adds micro management (building and commanding these small transports) while you also want to think about your next strategic move and command your troops and their flights (say you have 4-5 airships going by now). Would this extra production and commanding add to the fun of playing the game? I'm just not sure I myself would find it fun in the long run (my personal opinion and I don't have your entire vision on this of course, so there might be details here that makes it better than I imagine it now).

This scenario could be much more manageable once we can give "flight orders" while paused, but without that I think this can feel stressful trying to manage everything in "real time" as it is right now.

What if these transports instead could be produced and put in a "transport pool" or give us a transport capacity. Then we could build them manually and when recruiting or moving troops they will use this pool. X transport gives us the option to transport X soldiers simultaneously. This way we still need to produce them but we can skip the manual commanding of them. What do you think of this idea?

The reason for the possibility of loosing your soldier in transit (very low chance of course, but still a chance) is to make the strategic choice a little more interesting. Do I use my precious airship and time to transport this guy myself or do I send him on his merry way by himself, but with an added small risk and a small fee, so I can instead spend the precious time and airship immediately on a mission? This goes for new recruits and transport between bases. After the decision is made no more input from you is needed and your time (as in "brain-time") is freed up to handle other tasks.

Leimboy: I fully support your automated idea. Just give order to any of your soldiers or items to be transferred from A to B and that automated taxi will arrive for it and transport what is needed. Just before you give order estimated cost and time are calculated. That would be all from player perspective. But first you need to enable such option by building that taxi. Algorithm responsible for assigning each taxi for each task would need to be quite complex but nothing impossible. :)

Yokes: You have a good point that it would require some complex subsystems added to what is already in the game. This might not be the right time to overload the devs with even more complexity.

This is what I imagine the automated "transport pool" variant could look like, from a more mechanical viewpoint:

We need to build the taxis ourselves first. This requires a new unit that we have access to from the start, preferably. These taxis will then be added to a pool (just a counter probably, as they are never seen). There could be an upper limit on how many we can have, but I guess one or two will enough in the early game. Double or triple that by mid / late game.

When we use these taxis hiring / shipping soldiers there could be a fixed "price" for the trip, like 10 materials as fuel or something like that, and that's it. Only ETA needs to be calculated for the trip at this point (x2 to simulate leaving base, get to the haven and back). When the soldier arrives the taxi goes back to the pool. There would be no risks involved with the transportation so no calculations for this is needed.

I have absolutely no knowledge of what this mechanic would require of the devs to implement, but I presume this mechanic alone is fairly simple to implement if they wanted to.

Some complexity would show up when they must handle these transports en-route to a suddenly destroyed base for example, but I would also be OK if the transports were called teleporters instead and delivered people instantly ;)

Thank you, Yokes, for a very constructive discussion on this topic as I think this is one thing (among many other suggestions) that would make the game more fun for all of us.