How can you also forget the satellite bases that just have an airport and some missile batteries. Can't believe we're missing out on the world's deepest base building since checkers.
Who ever said anything about deep? The coolest thing about base building in X-com was:
1. The ability to build your base anywhere and call it anything
2. The ability and need to build multiple bases so you'd have interceptor as well as radar capabilities around the globe
3. The ability to have base battles and see your base, built to your liking, get blown up and try to desperately defend it.
It was never super deep sim, but somehow it was still casualized to hell in XCOM's version. You didn't have multiple bases and instead just transferred ships to each country location. In addition, the XCOM satellites in each country gave away some of the strategic need of carefully picking your base locations (dat time in your first playthrough when your interceptors run out of fuel and lose sight of the UFO). This was further casualized witht he stupid 3 missions and pick only one retardedness of XCOM. Finally, you can build your base to your liking, but in XCOM you never got to have base battles for some reason I can't understand beyond the fact that they wanted to heavily script the game's story.
So yah, base building in x-com wasn't super deep, but it was fun in the sense that it gave you a lot more control than XCOM does.
EDIT: Also, the layout in base building in X-com was top down instead of to the side like the XCOM antfarm. What's the difference? Well in XCOM your slots are already pre-chosen. All you have to decide on is what goes in each slot. There's only a defined amount of slots in a very defined order. In x-com you had to be mindful of how all the parts fit together, much like a puzzle piece. Build in the wrong order and all of a sudden you're wasting space, and need to build a lift to another level unnecessarily. Yeh, it's not rocket surgery, but it's yet another thing that x-com required you to think about, and was not automatic.