This is just a suggestion, but it could save some rounds in the beginning.
When the mission starts, soldiers are placed around the airship. If I want to do immediately any kind of activity, (like secure the surroundings) it takes about two rounds to move at least a half of them from behind the ship. This vehicle is usually near the edge of map, so it means that a part of soldiers is separated from a battleground between a map edge and ship, or worse, in a map corner, where even more of them is placed uselessly.
It would be nice, if they would just appear in within a ship, so they could all get out and go in the direction where I need. It was so in original X-com games and it worked fine. I understand, that paranoid green brains of soldiers, despite of the alien-infested area, feels the need to lose a time with surrounding the ship against the mysterious and potentially dangerous impenetrable darkness of the map edge, but I'm their commander, and I should set the priorities.
Surely, this has a sense, if the aircraft would always land in the middle of map, and it would be really surrounded by buildings full of aliens, but this is not the case on all maps I remember. And getting out of the ship, on what side I actually need, would serve just as well.
Even better would be to calculate the soldiers' positions between a ship, and a map center, so they would actually appear in front of ship.