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I wouldn't care much except being the hanger is two units long. The command centre automatically drops itself one unit from the lowest edge and 3 from the top.

Does anyone know where the starting base layout data is stored? im trying to rearrange the starting layout to something that would actually make sense with the same buildings Can someone point me in the right direction?

Not sure if this is the right part of forum, so please move if needed It's actually not a bug, just suggestion or opinion ... Did you notice, that in the initial base you have only two places where to place laboratory and/or workshop? If it was intended, ok. But I can't make more workshops or labs without destroying some (already built and paid ) facilities - looks like wasting time and money for me. So maybe just a thing for polishing before beta comes up ... Thanks developers for another build, it will be great game! Edit: It is the same for living quarters, it is also size 1 x 2 tiles.

I'd like to talk for a bit about the aesthetics of building a base. By that, I mean the factors that go into designing a base which maximises benefits and minimises drawbacks. In the original X-Com series, there were two major base design factors. 1, the need to produce choke points to guide aliens down the proxy grenade trap of DOOM. 2) The need to specialise bases into large scale research or manufacturing facilities (especially the latter). The pilots hated the walk to debrief. In UFO: The Two Sides, base layout was once again dictated by base invasion. While choke points had been removed, the "base" was considerably easier to defend if you placed modules on as few parallel lines as possible to produce the maximum number of zero-cover corridors as possible. The UFO AfterX series took an original slant: in Aftermath you had a fixed number of sites for buildings per territory, research was dependant on having x number of sites for new topics, and all territories had to be connected. In Aftermath, the base was so generic the only guidng factor was determining which building to construct first, and base attack missions always took place away from the guts of the base. In UFO:ET they did away with base construction for the most part, and base design wasn't influenced by anything - large scale manufacturing didn't even pay for itself let alone make a profit and aliens had spawn points liberally scattered through the base. So what influences base design in Xenonauts? Several factors. First of all, geoscape factors: 1) I need interceptors. Lots of them. The current alpha dictates that I will need at least one MiG (to launch avalanches at corvettes) and two F-17s (to escort the MiG and deal with fighters) per base. Hangars are small, so I can cram 7 of them in on one "line". The high number of alien craft present early on, especially the high number of fightercraft on ait superiority missions requires more than this "basic" quantity. It's easy to have six interceptors on the go all the time, especially when I'm transporting goods from base-to-base or have sent a chinook out and need to provide fighter cover. 2) Inital range of dropship is continental, rather than intercontinental. By giving the chinook a limited range, this requires the first few bases built to have a chinook of their own (to respond to shot down craft and terror missions), a large pool of soliders (to man the chinook, provide replacments to killed/injured soliders and act as second-line defence in case of base defence), and limited manufacturing facilities (teams that go out on missions require ammo and other consumables. My main manufacturing plant should not be turning out batches of ammo. It should be turning out the Next Big Thing). 3) Hand-in-hand with 1) MiGs (which I need) must be manufactured. MiGs are very vulnerable after they have shot their load. MiGs get shot down. Secondly, battlescape factors. 1) Chris has previously written that if base modules get damaged, this affects the effectiveness of the module in the geoscape. This means mining the crap out of a choke point might be an effective tactical strategy, but it's strategic no-no. 2) Chris has also written on how every base will have a command center, and if I loose the command center, I loose the base. This would suggest "wrapping" the command center in other modules would be a smart plan. However, what do I wrap it in? Would a layer of storerooms make sense? After all, they aren't as critical if they are damaged - but then I don't get as much room to build other base modules. 3) It is unknown at this point how spawn points will be handled. I've looked back through older posts and from what Chris has written, it seemed that inital spawn points were going to be in hangars, but he seemed to have changed his ideas on this point. Finally, logistical factors 1) Chris has stated that manufacturing will not be for-profit. It is therefore uncessary to have dedicated base-factories, as the outlay will not match the profits from sales. 2) Transferring goods between bases costs money and is vulnerable to alien fightercraft. Transport costs are less than the cost of setting up a workshop in another base, but alien piracy is (currently) a menace and can set back the development of a base considerably. This suggests a distributed manufacturing model will be less costly in terms of alien piracy - unless Chris tweaks the air superiority missions so they attack less transports, or we can dedicate interceptors to running escort for transport. 3) Workshop production rates are currently a little on the low end. Producing large batches of goods takes considerable time even with a strong workforce, then more time is involved in transporting those goods to outlying bases. This strengthens the distributed manufacuturing model, as it is more efficent to have local workshops producing local goods instead of waiting for a central base Well, that's a lot! I'm sure I've missed things, but effective base design in Xenonauts, when you look at it, is quite the complex beast. Has anyone come up with a good design for a base yet?

My apologies if this was already discussed elsewhere - I did a search and found nothing on the topic, but could have missed something. One of my pet peeves with UFO was the terrible layout of the first base with regard to defending from invasion. It bothered me enough that I hacked the game to use a layout of my own design. Now, I understand why in UFO you did not get the opportunity to design the layout of your first base: that would be a lot of detail for the first moments of play, and the first-time player would have no idea what layouts would be preferred, or what the tactical considerations even might be. I'm sure similar reasoning applies equally well to Xenonauts, and I never really expected any first-base-layout options when I first heard about this project some time ago. Nonetheless, I find myself feeling that same niggling dissatisfaction: "All my bases will be well-designed, except my most important one." Now, I still don't expect an in-game method of laying out your first base to be added, but perhaps this might be an easy thing to accomplish with some light modding? I see a 1-day hack which can be enabled from one of the xml files. Is there a zero-cost building hack as well? Put the two together and you can basically tear down and rebuild your first base at the start of the game, then save and quit and disable the cheats. Or perhaps the layout of the first base can be edited directly somewhere? I acknowledge this is a minor quibble -- it's just one of those things that bothered me twenty years ago and still applies, so I thought I'd mention it.

One of the truly silly restrictions of X-Com has always been how few buildings you could physically fit into a single base. I usually ended up with one base mostly for storage alone. Stupid. What buildings you have in a base should depend on what you want to build and if you can afford it. Unless you're building your sekrit base in the middle of a city, space itself would not be an issue. What could be an issue is the map size the tactical engine can handle. If you simply allow more tiles and the game crashes when trying to load the map on a base attack, that's a no go. In that case, the base could simply have *drum roll* a basement! No hangars / garages can be built in the basement level because the vehicles need to have access to the surface. Everything else is not handicapped by a flight of stairs or a lift. The tactical engine already does multi-level stuff so if ground and basement level each get 2 map levels, that's plenty for the map designer to play with. 2 levels are less at-a-glance in the base building window because you couldn't see the entire base at once... unless the base area is rectantular instead of square and you see both levels at once. Obvious is good.

It could be very useful if there were a way to build, test, and save base designs without having to play the game itself.

Could we get the option to decide the layout of the first base? I always went for quite a specific layout in X-COM, with potential alien entry points clustered together near the top of the map, to aid base defense missions later in the game. Also I'm kinda fussy and never liked the inverted Y layout...

Just thought this was very interesting. Firaxis is making an X-Com remake in the proper style, and what jumped at me is their base design. It's from the side instead of top. Uploaded with ImageShack.us

In just about every XCom-like game I've played, when you create a new base, it has a preset default layout. A terrible preset default layout with alien accessible hangars scattered all over the place, connected to everything else without chokepoints. If you want to specify a layout for defensive or aesthetic purposes, you're forced to destroy and rebuild rooms, which seems silly if you just built the base. It'd be nice if we had the option to define our own base layouts right off the bat. (Just give us the default rooms with no cost or building time.) Also, it would be nice if we could specify connections between facilities within the base, rather than having them automatically connect to all adjacent rooms. All rooms would still have to be connected, of course.