In the Lore, the only Space Marines who use Teleportation are the elite units, usually the 1st Company Terminators. Most Space Marines use Transports, namely Razorbacks (6), Rhinos (10), Drop Pods (12), Land Raiders (12), Storm Ravens (12), Land Raider Crusader (16), Stormwolf (16), Storm Eagles (20), Thunderhawks (30), Stormbirds (60+), etc. (Numbers in brackets represent the transport capacity.) I would want any stationary transport, like a parked Rhino, near the fighting but not close enough where it could be easily destroyed and to act as a spawn point but with a spawn time penalty for using it. But for more rapid spawns, at a cost of points, I would use either aircraft that swoop in and drop off a unit or a Drop Pod that only allows up to 12 spawns but can be steered towards a specific place.
See, now you just completely invalidated your own argument by trying to advocate for "smart" and "clever" tactical behavior in a warhammer 40k game. So, by this I should interpret that there should be no melee, chainswords, flamers, droppods, jumppacks, orks, along with everything ork related, CC psyker powers, assault terminators, meltaguns, and firing from the hip. Space Marines should hide behind cover and only pop their heads up to take sniper potshots at the oncoming hordes, just like ARMA, because if there's one thing warhammer strives to be it's a simulator of realistic combat. *cough* Sarcasm aside, probably the best argument for nearby spawning is that it's directly correlated to how fearless or cowardly your players are going to act. Nobody's ever going to charge into melee if they know they'll have to footslog 5 minutes to get back into melee, and do you really want to see the armies of the 41st millenium dicking around behind cover because they're too scared to engage directly? Hell, "waaaaagh" basically translates to "yolo" when you think about it.
I'd say that a degree of illogical behavior is universal amongst the 40k races. Your alternative is this. There are no real combat situations where waving a chainsword around is a good idea, but the concept of fearlessly charging your enemy and intentionally putting your life at risk for blood and glory is intrinsic to 40k. There's no getting around the fact that melee is going to make your life a lot shorter, so simultaneously trying hit the important themes of 40k and trying to make spawning "realistic" may be mutually exclusive. And as far as making spawning harder to achieve, the expense of a spawn location is a very malleable thing, and I think you might be attacking the wrong concept if your target is battlefield attrition. Any invincible base spawn is far more conducive to infinite pub hordes than a vulnerable mobile spawn with a requisition cost.
Well, a big part of the reason there needs to be some waiting and walking involved with spawning is simply so the front can move and territory can change hands. For example, let's say we designed a spawn system where when you died, you were instantly respawned at a random point within 10 feet of the nearest friendly unit. This cuts "downtime" to an absolute minimum: you have zero spawn timer and you're spawned directly on the leading edge of the front line, so really the only limiting factor is the loading screen (unless the game runs well enough that the loading screen doesn't happen). In such a system it would be extremely hard to push the line of battle one way or another. You shoot somebody, and by the time you've moved your sights to the next target he's already respawned. The only way the battle line would move would be if one side managed to push with so much momentum that they were constantly killing people in the split-second of disorientation most people have after respawning, and that would probably require vastly outnumbering the other side. So in general, dying has to result in at least some amount of downtime in order for the game to be functional.
Ok, you really REALLY need to go play planetside, specifically watch how quickly an attack dissipates after the offensive sunderers have been destroyed. Limiting spawns is going to lead to short and boring battles as people try to snipe their opposition and that isn't very 40k'ish. To have the grand battles the devs want the game to have is going to require limitless spawns and I think you'd agree that tiny break from realism is worth it to have a good 500+ battle.
A lot of things change when you have distances of over 5km to spread out, sometimes even between bases, and when you're considering a game with as much long range and tank armor combat as EC, you need to be very careful about how you manage troop movement. As far as the assault marines go, we have them in PS2 as well, as jump pack troops with C4 bricks. People call them "C4 Fairies" and they do tend to be one of the bigger threats to a Sunderer (the mobile spawn vehicle). But they're not always a bad thing - they encourage active defense of the spawn points, and provide a quick way for the defenders to halt an uncoordinated offense. When the combat is Sunderer vs Sunderer, things get really interesting, because suddenly both sides have spawn vulnerability and the frontline becomes very dynamic. For a good example of spawns done right (albiet on a much, much smaller scale) take a look at Natural Selection. Both sides have spawns that are commander deployed, resource-tied and vulnerable to attack, and if all the spawn options for the enemy team are destroyed, the match is automatically won. Individual lives don't cost resources (though equipment does) so bravado and rush attacks are still strategically valid, but the base becomes an important hub that requires constant vigilance to prevent spawn loss. It's a solid system that I think would scale up to EC without much trouble.
Then go sink a dozen more hours into PS2. RvR is similar but not enough to get an idea on how things are going to turn out. Real time combat (as opposed to skills in a timer) plays out very differently because there is no skill combo you can learn and it requires you to actively aim rather than 'tab targeting'. The difference in scale is also very large, running from one side of WvW to the other in GW takes ~30minutes but in PS2 going from one side of the continent to the other is probably ~2 hours (an estimate because I don't want to find out what it truly is). Assault marines hammer-bombing a spawn is (as Luciasar said) akin to the c4 fairies of PS2. It forces the attackers to always be weary of a strike-squad of defenders going after the rhino because the attack will fail quickly if they are all destroyed. The only problem I can forsee with a system like that will make HC micro-manage a portion of the front-line rather than focusing on the bigger picture. HC should decide what base to attack and which one to defend. Leave the spawn options to be decided by the field commanders, as they are the ones to best deploy them.
What about those who aren't in squads? Not everyone wants to play in a squad and restricting spawns to squad leaders heavily punishes those players. Also command rhino's only for the 'big enough' guilds/outfits? I shouldn't have to tell you why that is a daft idea.
My ideal would be a hierarchy of spawning that follows the chain of command. I'd agree that it's best the high level folks don't do more micro than they need to, but remember that the REALLY high level stuff is probably just going to be a discussion in a battlecruiser and may not even involve the map. Commanders aren't fighting on the ground (mostly) so they can afford to make extra decisions. So, in general we'd have: Mobile Spawn - Rhino and etc. I like the idea of having the mobile spawn pattern be an expensive variant of the default rhino so that it's a more significant investment for solo players, and to increase the respect for command deployed spawns. But they still need to be there, so independent players can have autonomous power. Squad Spawn - Something along the lines of the PS2 squad spawn beacon, but hopefully reigned in a little bit. This is one of the hardest things to implement well, because while you want players to form cohesive squads and stay together, allowing airdrops in from anywhere on the drop of a hat is asking for abuse. But some form of this needs to exist so that squads stay effective. Static Commander Spawn - This is what PS2 lacks, and it's a serious detriment to the command structure of that game. I like the NS2 system because it gives the commander some control over the source of the forces they wield, and an incentive to shape the battlefront with deployables. I'd imagine this as a warpgate, chaos rift, standing teleport beacon, or rokk lander, all off which are tough and could be supplemented with commander tools like sentry turrets and shielding to create a full FOB, but are a massive expenditure of RP and are only practical for large scale engagements. Could also take time to build. The bases of EC's continents would contain rooms intended to defensibly house these structures, rather than predefined invincible spawnrooms. Dynamic Commander Spawn - stuff like airdrops, for elite squads with special missions. Costs RP and takes a commander to deploy, but is one use only. Base Spawn - HAHA no. These suck. Their very existence breeds zergs and farming fail. Rid the game of them! Power to the players!
