My base layout

[BBHood217]

Just felt like posting the final layout of my bases right before I flew to Mars, not just as a memento but also as a future reminder on how I should build my bases the next time I play a new game of this awesome mod.

[Ethereal_Medic]

Your bases are designed to be never crack-down'ed.
This late in the game you can pulverize all crafts so I the reason for no choking points and 'traps'.

You can scrap ALL of your armored vaults and simply hire workers. This way you got even more space for lux.-barracks and workshops.

[BBHood217]

I've never actually tried it for fear of possibly breaking the game with an error, but can you actually have negative storage space?

[Ethereal_Medic]

I've never actually tried it for fear of possibly breaking the game with an error, but can you actually have negative storage space?

Yes we can! Even if you have 0 vault storage due to no facility granting it you can have as much negative storage store as you can afford workers. The game can't be broken this way.

[Ragshak]

BBHood217, so you don't bother with whole globe radar coverage? Only 3 bases.

[BBHood217]

I was too lazy to change how I always placed my bases in UFO Defense (except for my first base being in Europe instead of the US so my Airbus/Aircar can reach the most places), which there was enough to see almost every UFO and know where they're headed.  Admittedly I don't have quite the same massive coverage here since the hyperwave decoder's range is smaller than in UFO, but it's still enough to see and track most shippings; my only really major blind spot is the Pacific, and the few shippings that do their business there could potentially do it completely out of my sight.  But again, I'm too complacent to change my base placements.

[BBHood217]

With another game done, I present to you the final layout of my bases once again.  Now with (almost) zero vaults to make room for more important facilities, and no Mint this time because I didn't feel like doing any tedious counterfeiting this time.

As the name suggests, my fourth base was only an experiment with the new Plantation facilities (the 0.99J3 update happened around year 2); and as such, it was late in the campaign when the base was finally fully up and running.  I liked what I saw though, so perhaps in the future this will be my third base with the factory base being the fourth one.

And yes, that's the Zubrin instead of the Conqueror.  Just for the hell of it, I decided to try Cydonia in the Zubrin with plans to reload and continue working towards the Conqueror when I fail.  But surprisingly, I took out the Solar Governor and won with only 6 gals in annihilator suits and 2 syns (well, one syn; one of them got lost en route, it seems).  So I decided "That's the game" and didn't bother with the Conqueror.

[Ethereal_Medic]

RNG must've been kind with no/small instances of crackdowns.
For veterans doing Cydonia with just the Zubrin (and with no surprise the RNJesus to have 2! Syns in total) seems kinda doable.

With just 8 (7) soldiers I can kinda guess that the surface-mission got simply skipped by rushing into the elevator area. Lack of resources, poor vision, heavily outnumbered and exposed on a large open map begs for a plan B against mercenaries fielding plasma and gauss weapons.
 
For casuals, the big red ship is alot more save to use. No random death(s) and up to 36 soldiers or 32 soldiers and a HWP.

The mission inside favours small groups thanks to all those tight corridors and voodoo-trained crackmarines shrug-off even SG Coordinator mindcontrol-attacks with ease.

[BBHood217]

With just 8 (7) soldiers I can kinda guess that the surface-mission got simply skipped by rushing into the elevator area. Lack of resources, poor vision, heavily outnumbered and exposed on a large open map begs for a plan B against mercenaries fielding plasma and gauss weapons.

That's pretty much what I did.  I got lucky because the exit pyramid was nearby but still a bit too far away to reach by running in one turn from the Zubrin, so first I had to duck into another pyramid that was closer to me.  Had to stay inside the Zubrin for a few turns taking out all the nearby enemies before dashing, which is made harder by the fact that the Zubrin isn't exactly a stable ship and camping in it is not a good idea.

Also, there was an interesting item in the Zubrin.  It was a note called "Universe Respects Only Strength".  Dunno what that was about, and I can't exactly recover it and research it to find out.  It's probably not even recoverable or researchable anyway.