Although this is the generally accepted design, I personally don't like it for Piratez. Many Piratez factions present odd challenges that are more easily overcome by playing differently for me, especially in base defences.
Especially early in the game, many factions (academy, spartans, regular guild) will attack your base with lots of weak units (almost all spartans, academicians, GOs, guild reps and Hostesses) that sport strong (plasma + blaster) weapons and, for the academy, some psi. It is much easier to have quick access to them and take the offensive. You can slaughter a whole bunch with a few rockets T1 in the hangars, crippling their morale and, with some fire, effectively paralysing them in there to be picked on. This significantly reduces the risk of something going wrong by reducing the number of enemy units.
Other factions (or even the guild if you get a guildmaster + several power armors) can present you with tough enough units that they can push through the bottleneck without you being able to shoot them effectively or approach them for melee since they are all together coming out of your one entry point.
A lift also provides the enemy with nice cover from the doors. Breaching the lift is always the worst part of my base defences. As such, I make sure that the enemy walk through something clear without doors to protect them.
My usual setup is something like:
55L555
HHHHHH
HHHHHH
142434
OOOOOO
OOOOOO
Where numbers represent the priority of building either vaults or barracks at that location, L is the lift, and O are other valuable facilities. The 5s on the top row are the last buildings I build, usually all at once (to prevent a few gals from being isolated and overpowered there, although hiding upstairs and ambushing there can work). This uses the whole space, which is good.
Early on, it makes the lift totally irrelevant since the enemies will walk into the open in hangars where they are much easier to pick off. Later on, once you build up the top row, you can tackle the lift from two sides, while your gals on the other side hit the hangars so the lift doesn't get reinforced. On the bottom, you have plenty of little rooms to hide in and direct, open lines of fire into the hangar from the corridors. Snipers, HMG and rocket gals can hide in the back behind smoke.
If you face enemies that need to be taken out in melee, they will be spread out coming out of the hangars in the #1-4 facilities, which reduces the likelihood that they can cover each others with reaction fire, instead of making one unapproachable clump in the one bottleneck.
Once you have strong and plentiful enough ranged weapons that you don't have to fear the clump, and psi-strong enough gals that you don't have to fear psi so you can take your time, a bottleneck might be great, but by then, you don't really have much to fear and might as well use all the tiles in your base.
