What's the best setup for Echelon mirrors?

[Patashu]

And no, it's not putting rows of echelon mirrors and solar ones, I remember seeing a thread on this before...

[Jamski]

The thread said the best was rows of mirrors/solars.

-Jam

[Maniac]

It depends... (generic answer useful for everything ) on the size and form of your energy park.

[Patashu]

Oh it did?

...

Haha. Silly me.

[Method]

the best way to use mirrors outside of energy parks is...not to. Use forests and boreholes instead.

[Skanky Burns]

This is one such example of an energy park. Note that the echelon mirrors go on the inside rows, so your row of quicker-building solars go on the outside edges.

[Commy]

Energy parks? I never heard of them till last week, and I just assumed they were like a couple squares on high elevations. But, this is like, huge. How do you garrison it and make sure no one builds in it? Why don't you put like a base or two inside it just for territorial protection? I must really be bad at this game, because I never use these. Maybe I should take it more seriously.

[Frankychan]

I place a base or two inside the energy park just because I'm lazy to go off somewhere and build a "proper" energy park.

That, and I like having my terraformed stuff close to me.

[Skanky Burns]

There are bases there and ALL that land is inside my territory. I hid the bases and units so you could see that land underneath them. Otherwise all those solars and mirrors have crawlers on them, not to mention the mines and a few of the forests (before they too are converted to energy parks.

There are 4 bases on that map, the four undeveloped tiles that have forests around them. Remember, echelon mirrors don't work outside your territory.

[Jamski]

It needs to be raised as well, Skanky, for maximum CA$H

-Jam

[Skanky Burns]

But that takes former time. I was replacing forests with echelon mirrors (+1 compared to forests for an operation that didn't cost money as well) and then the forests with solars for +many.

Raising it was on the to-do list, but unfortunately the game got corrupted.

I'm still trying to get a game going as well as that one. My newest one has me with 3x the number of cities in the same area of territory (only 1 monolith this time though) and obviously much less tiles left over for crawling.

The worst part of the new game though was the fact the caretakers landed two squares away from my capital. I only survived though because the other aliens landed on the other side of the caretakers and have occupied their attention since then. The scout protecting my capital did destroy two caretaker bases that tried to take some of the cities work-area though. They tried planting the city in the same spot both times.
Hooray for my conquering scouts!

[Barinthus]

Originally posted by Skanky Burns
This is one such example of an energy park. Note that the echelon mirrors go on the inside rows, so your row of quicker-building solars go on the outside edges.

I need sunglasses

[Snowflake]

See here for some designs.

[Santiago_Claus]

There's a "minimum former time" design, too:

E S E S E S E S
S S S S S S S S
S E S E S E S E
S S S S S S S S
E S E S E S E S

Here every interior E. Mirror gets full utilization. This design assumes you have tons of land and crawlers and that former-turns are the scarce resource.

I don't like it, myself, preferring the solid rows most others build, but there it is for your entertainment.