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Hm .. never thought i would be accused of trying to make things too easy. The internet is a wide place. Why cant i send triple dropships to a single crashsite in X1 ? Or rather 10 ? 10 dropships with 8 soldiers each makes 80 soldiers vs 6 aliens. In my book that would guarantee the likelyhood of success. Seems like a good move to me. Im just trying to point out that applying logic to video games does not work out very well. A main unattackable base would go well together with the proposed global personal/storage/whatever and the teleporter setting. In this paragraph i would like to point out that teleportation and dropships are fundamentally the same mechanic. Whether a dropship takes 2 hours to get to a crashsite, or a teleporter needs 2 hours to zero in on the crashsite coordinance is gameplaywise the same thing. You can even add UFOs which jamm the teleporter in an radius around it to prevent taking on a crashsite before the UFO is taken out. This would be the fighter shooting down dropship equivalent. Everything has a solution. I dont mind dropships nor teleporting. You can make the same mechanics for both of them. Faster dropships ? Just manufacture an upgrade module to faster zero in on the crashsites coordinance ( for a single connection ). Increase troop size ? Just manufacture a higher energy module. It basically really is the same thing. You just have to be creative. Only at one point in development you have to decide whether you go with a teleporter setting, or a dropship setting. MECHANICALLY you can realise the same mechanics for both of them. My 3k+ hours of Xenonauts and X-Division + the one thousand hours of various other youtubers agree on the following points below. It is not viable to have more than one production base. Since items are automatically transfered to the base the dropship starts from, and you usually have your main team in your main base + shot down interceptor items are automatically recovered to the first base you put down the game doesnt incentivise you to have have more than one production base - having a global item storage which items get transfered to and from would solve that and motivate the player to experiment with more setups. Getting your second/third/fourth strike team up and running is mostly a chore. And just a a candy bonus ontop - having a global pool of soldiers to choose from would mean you could build a deeper, more complex rooster of soldiers instead of saying all the time "Oh, I really would like to send soldier X on this mission. Too bad he is in another base." Base attacks were arguably the least fun part of the game. Read about it here: https://www.goldhawkinteractive.com/forums/index.php?/topic/13414-165xce-v0350-x-division-100-beta/&do=findComment&comment=173187 having a global defensive system would make the whole thing a more fun, approachable situation, where you take on the surviving aliens after the batteries (?) reduced the numbers. Having the option to pull out would mean these kind of missions could become a well integrated part of the game, instead of either people never actually seeing a base attack because the whole threat is too weak, or base attacks killing every campaign. I think these points represent clear improvements after this guideline: --- Now after everything is said and done, i dont fundamentally disagree with your overall assessment @TrashMan. If you remove complexity and micromanagement in one place to clearly improve the game, you also have to add it in again somewhere else. Especially base locations, relationship influence on boni, specialists working in countries, and other forms of min-maxing could replace the lost micro and macro management of the feeling of leading a global organisation. During the development of Starcraft 2 a lot of people were worried that they made the game too easy. Playing Starcraft 1 on basically ANY level is quite difficult. Now people were worried that they removed too many physically hard to execute gameplay elements to sacrifice them for the accessibility of the game. What Blizzard then did was to remove certain hard to execute mechanics from Starcraft 1, and replaced it with different hard to execute mechanics. Starcraft 2 allows one control group to contain up to 500 units, from the original 12 max, made it possible for buildings to have rally points instead of having to manually assign every drone to every mineral patch EVERY TIME you made a drone, being able to select multiple buildings at a time instead of only one, no longer having to babysit the pathing of your units, no longer having to individually select spell casters if you want to have any reasonable control over them, shift-queueing commands and friendly units moving out of the way if a worker wants to build a building. To compensate for that they added injections, chrono boosts, mules, army- moves-as-is, and many other micro management intensive mechanics. Now saying that no longer being able to move an item from one base to another removes micro management from X2 is as reasonable as saying Starcraft 2 no longer requires any skill to play. It just matters where you sneak in the the removed macro and micro management again .

Teleportation was a solution to the terrible 1-base decision, since you had to reach every apart of the globe from 1 location. If multi-bases are in, then teleportation is not needed. I despise teleportation, not only because of narrative and world-building reasons and the the massive can of worms it opens, but because of the mechanical implications. (Also, Stargate turned to trash, the only thing saving it was good cast chemistry and banter. And the elder race tropes are in my opinion generally terrible - anything that treats science as magic is) X-Com games have NOT been just about squad-level tactics. If that is what one is after, there are many games that do it a LOT better (Jagged Alliance 2 for example). Planning and logistics on a grander scale are - to me - the defining aspect of X-Com. Hence, when such is trivilized with magitech teleportation that makes logistic utterly irrelevant (base location does not matter, travel time does not matter, local resource managment does not matter) it leaves a poor taste in my mouth. Also, having a single base, a single point of faliure is a really bad idea for any military group.

Yeah, so this discussion sort of explains why we shouldn't try to implement multiple dropships right now - we need to nail down exactly what that means first. If the personnel that can be assigned to the dropship remain global, multiple dropships becomes a far simpler task (in some ways it's actually easier than having to special-case the existence of a single dropship but still allow it to be replaced if shot down etc), but I'm not sure everyone would consider that a valid implementation.

Imo, a multi-base approach makes sense if an only if it's actually viable to have multiple bases with soldiers. It was not in X1. So I chose the third option. Global stores makes quite a bit of sense, since transfer costs are pretty low anyways, in most games non-global stores just mean you have to put all manufacturing in your main base.