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Depends how Goldhawk want people to interact with the strategic game mechanisms, really. Money is one of the primary mechanisms for governing what a player can do at any given moment, acting as a pool of potential energy that can be directed. If the pool can be only increased by interacting and influencing strategic game mechanisms that the player can't directly take control of (e.g. keeping good relations with funding blocs), then the player is incentivised to take actions which increase that influence, enmeshing the player into those strategic game mechanisms more deeply. If the player can directly take control of the means of increasing the pool (e.g. by manufacturing goods and selling them), then the player is incentivised to focus more on those things that the player has control of, ignoring other strategic game mechanisms except where a failure to interact with those game mechanisms results in a game over (upsetting funding blocs isn't important when your outfit makes more money that the sum total of funding blocs in a month).

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.

So you want small attackable bases and a single main base that is unattackable? How does that make sense? Why would the alien refuse to attack the most important place? Seems to me you just want an easy mode that does look like one. Every base should be attackable by the enemy. And not just by troops, but also air bombardment. This wouldn't destroy the base outright (since most facilites are underground), but would damage it, take it off-line for a while. Either the entire base could be unusable for a while (burried entrance?) or there could be a random dice roll to see which buildings were damaged, depending on how strong the attack was (how many alien craft and of which type were involved). Some buildings like hangars and airstrips would have a higher weight to get damaged, since they are more exposed. To me this seems like a good balance as it's not TOO punishing, especially early on. You could also make it so that a base can be fully destroyed if bombed twice (again, giving the player time and opportunity to stop it with air intercepts)

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.