Are you able to place brains during the Build Base phase of the metagame? It seems no matter what I do, I can only place the brain outside of the base (even though it has many paths to orbit), which means I can only walk it in during a battle and frankly this seems to defeat the purpose of bases entirely. Is this just how it is or is there something I'm missing?

Thanks in advance.

(Also, the best way to win a contested area is to just crush the enemy brain with the dropship you came in on. Not sure if that's very fair at all. Maybe it should be changed to a rocket or drop pod?)

yeah building is a little weird.
what you have to do is make a base then when you make it the blocks have not been permanently placed yet and the dirt hasn't been removed, so you have to end the building then next turn continue the building and the blocks will be permanently placed and the dirt will be moved away then you can place you're brain in the base.

hoped this helped!

Automatic building sidesteps this issue, but it has problems of its own, like funds going mysteriously unspent over a couple turns.

Is this going to be changed? I don't see why you can't "plan" for the brain to be moved as well when planning the rest of the base...

I've been able to move my brain, it's even the first thing selected all i had to do was right click to get out of the menu and move the brain wherever I wanted to.

If you select a different type of brain and place it the robot should disappear too iirc.

The problem is you can't place it in plan mode because the base isn't actually there, so you can only set it outside.

this all needs to be polished, and i'll do a proper video about this soon, but the trick is to use Deployments