If you’re taking 2 transports full of soldiers to a given mission/map then you should be able to deploy all of those soldiers on the actual map.
I can kinda get it that you might take a smaller squad if you were performing some kind of stealth operation, but for things like scavenging and haven defence why on earth would you leave half of your fire power on the drop ship?
I seem to remember during early development that their was a plan to have upto 16 units (is that right?) this for me was a massive draw.
I guess they’re the security detail? I imagine some of it stems from having different transports with different maxes, since 8 would be two full Syn ships (I think, never have bought one). It is a bit strange though. I also feel like I remember reading that squad sizes would be able to be a lot larger than what we have.
In my opinion this would be a much needed mechanic for the type of game we have at the moment. We have missions with infinite enemies. Having 12-16 units would make those missions less painful. Would also help with the severe balance issue some missions have where you run into 3 sirens, 10 grenadiers, and 3 chirons. It would also takes a long time to get multiple ships…so I can see this being a mid to late game answer to missions with high difficulty.