LOL @ Black-Knight
That was the first thing i thought about when i read Raven's post. I even joined the BTOOIC movement/clan back then (damn, thats over 7 years ago allready) to make sure the option to disable buildable teleporters would be in the game (AoW2).
But buildable teleporters might be not be such a bad thing, if they're implemented right. Building something like that should be a major construction project, certainly not something you could (or would want to) build near every city you own.
Imagine for instance a game on a HUGE map, with several continents, and you are going for a conquest victory. After you (and your vassals/allies) have conquered your own continent, you start looking for new lands to expand into. Normaly you build a fleet, load up your troops and set sail. Still, the seas are a dangerous place and you might loose some of your forces to enemy ships, spells and monsters. Also transporting your troops like this might be fine for a short campaign, but conqering another continent is a major opperation that would propably requiere you to keep sending new armies and reinforcements from your homelands. In a situation like this it might be cool if you could build a teleporter to send troops from your homeland to the frontlines faster, and be able to bypass the dangerous trip over the seas. Still, doing this should not be easy. You would still have to establish a sizable beachhead first and defend it for a while before you are able to build the teleporter. Your enemy might also get some information through espionage or scouting on the location of the teleportation site, maybe long before it is finished. This site would then obviously become of great strategic importance for everyone involved in the war. (Something like the Rift between Kelewan and Midkemia in the Riftwar saga.)
You could do the same with a teleport spell, but i hope doing that would cost you a lot more and therefore not be a viable strategy in the long run. Maybe such a spell could only be cast by your sovereign and could only draw troops to him, so he would have to be on the frontlines and you might not want to risk sending him there.
Also, it might be cool if the teleporter could be captured by your enemies, thus giving them the ability to strike back at you in your homelands.
So summing up, buildable teleporters could be nice, as long as they are very expensive and far up in the tech tree, and therefore rare enough that they wouldn't show up every game. Maybe they could even be a random tech..
