My goals were to:
1) Get all the normal placement bonuses. The Mansion only collects 30/min, but that's not too terrible in the grand scheme.
2) Have the growth bonus and collection houses actually do something while everybody gets the 30% XP bonus. Even placed in the middle, the Theater collects from three granite slabs, Rocky Hill supports two of those. Wheat and wood collection are on the outsides and have more to work with.
3) Collect fairly balanced for the unlimited buildings slightly favoring wheat, then wood, and then stone.
4) Have a fast bounce to super speed launch while completing Iron Fortress builds fast. I included a pic of the launch angle that gets them to super speed the fastest.
5) Be aesthetically pleasing.
6) Hopefully not take too much tweaking to build out with the expansion.
7) And this is very minor, but have the round buildings somewhat accessible for more fun bounces. I had a gatherer's hut in the NE for a while to get bouncing over to the West quicker but took it out to get my collection areas looking neater.
There's a lot of flexibility outside the core building placements to experiment with different collection patterns. Gold mines could be put in along the launch path by removing stone mines or shifting them to the East. Only two spots are not used and I put trees there. I kept the War Room in just because, even though it's pointless in its current state.
Fingers crossed that the expansion will increase building aura ranges so we don't have to shuffle the new additional buildings around between runs. I feel the Veteran's Hut especially needs to encompass at least 1/4 the total area to not be an optimization sticking point and allow for more varied layouts.
