Currently, you can move personnel around only by using the Manticore.
This means that if you are in north america exploring and you have only one base in south america, your only way of swapping some soldiers between Manticore and your base (so they can also gain experience) is to travel all the way there to do it. Tedious, fuel and time consuming.
I think I read somewhere that there will be some kind of transportation mechanism in the final game. I hope it won’t be limited to transport between bases but also possible with friendly havens.
This would have the following benefits:
You can send soldiers from your base to a friendly haven where Manticore can pick them up
You can drop soldiers from Manticore in a friendly haven
You can buy a recruit (shouldn’t they volunteer to save human kind ?) even if manticore is full
Of course, this means that if a haven gets attacked and you have soldiers there:
those soldiers are there to protect it and count in the defense force
since they are the best, they stay alive until they are the last ones standing
at any time, you can launch a defense mission where your soldiers try to defend the haven with the local security forces (you control only PP soldiers). Of course, you can’t evacuate, it’s fight to the death.
if manticore arrives, it makes additional soldiers for the defense, but only 8 can evacuate (place in manticore).
Also, if a haven becomes unfriendly, soldiers there would have to move.
That would be more realistic but also would lead to increased granulation of player roster. If we could have like 200 soldiers then why not, but I doubt it will be the case. I would leave only PP dropships and PP bases as possible whereabouts for our soldiers. I would also allow to
use some cheap transport ships to move soldiers between bases to free our dropships from such work and maybe to take fresh recruits from havens (on the other hand I don’t know if I would not outsource that transport to local faction - you want to give us some soldier then bring him to our doorstep or to some agreed meeting place).
or would allow us to produce more dropships to do such job… But on the other hand I suppose that Manticore is too expensive and its production would be too much time consuming for building more of them. I suppose that limited number of transports will be meaningful factor in planning our strategy.
Worldwide transportation is down, and probably factions use some armored convoys to move stuff around. And we can’t afford to move too many things at the same time without protection.
So you would want to play missions where you will have 1 or 2 soldiers in such haven? In such case player would mostly watch NPCs battle, because his actions would last only few seconds. That would be boring for many players. I would leave defense of haven for local forces and not involve our soldiers unless we would have at least 4 of them there. And having so much soldiers in havens would leave our bases and dropships without manpower. I doubt that we will have so many soldiers to be able to leave them in such fashion even in friendly havens.
I suppose NOT until you want them to fight so you then run a mission and use your resources like ammo and consumables, repair weapon and armor… I suppose that PP doesn’t have proper infrastructure to support such actions. Or maybe you want such soldier to live and fight at cost for the heaven for provided defence of such soldier?
I really doubt that PP soldiers are the best. Of course they have better knowledge of the enemy. They may even have cutting edge techy items. They may have super combat training. But they are still only human with all their weaknesses living in the world after apocalypse, where alien menace is roaming everywhere and they (aliens) really rule our planet.
If we can have a cheap transport ship, it would solve the problem. However, having a transport ship that can bring your troops somewhere but they are forbidden to enter a mission would be weird. Maybe a cheap manticore with only 4 spaces available.
I don’t know if we want others to know where our bases are, so I guess that’s why they wouldn’t bring soldiers to our doorstep.
My reason to have soldiers in a haven would be because I don’t have a base close by ; so I don’t have to fly back to the other side of the map to switch soldiers between manticore and base. So you probably would have more than 1 or 2 and manticore should be fairly close to intervene.
So it would be a rare occasion where manticore is too far to intervene and you forgot to transfer one of your soldiers back to HQ (or too expensive to do it). Having a single soldier in such a mission trying to save his skin (and the haven) could be a really interesting mission (and possibly very hard depending on the haven’s security forces). Trying to turn the tide of a battle.
Of course they have better knowledge of the enemy. They may even have cutting edge techy items. They may have super combat training. But they are still only human with all their weaknesses living in the world after apocalypse, where alien menace is roaming everywhere and they (aliens) really rule our planet.