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This is the heartwarming developer story of Space Pirates and Zombies, an Indie game with a quality which is beyond AAA level in terms of actual gameplay. Enjoy. https://www.minmax-games.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3152&sid=00c24490c435faad69a4295f43b253a4

I played both the original X-Com and FiraXCOM and honestly, i like both base views, but i strongly in for multiple bases/dropships even though i used secondary bases just to store interceptors/base defences/radar mainly and up to 2 dropships mostly, like someone said already in this thread, i prefer having a more mundane and "realistic" approach to this game than cartoonish soldiers playing heroes.

I feel if multiple bases are a thing then base assaults should be something you will definitely have to contend with and be concerned about. You need a mechanic that can't be easily negated by a player being strong in one field. Kind of borrowing from Stargate here but that isn't always a bad thing. Assume for a second that ATLAS base was set up to research an alien artefact but was mothballed when the project had its funding pulled. If when the aliens began to arrive that artefact was found to be a teleportation device (shared the same energy signature as alien arrivals?) it would make sense that it became the central base for Xenoanuts to fall back to. You could get around the inability of humans to reverse engineer the tech by requiring another gateway to be captured from an alien base and keyed in to our new teleport network before it could be used to create a new Xenonauts base. Base assaults could then take place more like Stargate assaults in SG1. The aliens hack into your network, find the codes to open your gate and bombard whatever defences you have until they break through, preventing your base from contributing to the global effort or being reinforced at the same time. To begin with these assaults could be purely to lock down your gate and take a base temporarily offline but later in the game could lead to an all out ground assault. Research projects can be used to increase your defences, or they could help you track the hack back to an alien base with the only sure way to stop the raid being to take out its point of origin. Either way you wouldn't be able to negate all base assaults just by shooting down too many alien craft.

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.