What is the perfect base layout?

Question

Carefully planning your base's layout will lead to significant savings and bonuses. What goal should I have in mind when expanding my base? A perfect layout would be the one that wastes as little as possible and creates as many bonuses as possible.

Answer 1

I would recommend dedicated the entire right side of your base to laboratories and workshops, save for 1 or 2 rooms, which you will need for facilities that get no adjacency bonuses.

You will need to build 6 facilities that get no adjacency bonuses (Officer Training, Alien Containment, Foundry, Psionic Labs and 2 plot facilities which cannot later be removed or moved), and 2 square blocks of 4: 2 Satellite Uplink + 2 Satellite Nexus for a total of 16 satellites (which is exactly the number of satellites you need) + 2 Power Generator + Steam Generator + Elerium Generator to power the whole thing (a base with such a layout will produce 107 power and draw 102 power; you can replace the Thermo Generator with an Elerium generator if no steam block is in a suitable location, allowing you to drop 1 Power Generator and placing one of the non-adjacent facilities there, freeing up a slot in the right wing for another lab/workshop).

As you can see, 6 + 2 * 4 = 14, the number of rooms in one side of your base + 2. The 2 extra facilities will overflow into the right corner of the base, as so:

You can shuffle the blocks around, what's important is that you don't put facilities that get no adjacency bonuses in such a place that it will block bonuses for facilities that do

Should you ever become rich like Scrooge, you can remove 1 Power and 1 Thermo Generators and build a second Elerium Generator, allowing you to move 1 facility that get no adjacency bonuses from the right side to the left side.

Note that the laboratories have been replaced with workshops - by this point you will likely have researched everything there is to research

Proof of concept screenshot. Note my improper placement of plot facility 2 - it should be in a corner. Also note how blocks have been shuffled around to accommodate various demands over the base's lifetime.