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I always only build Large biodomes - never any other sizes. Large biodomes have room for 12 plant pads in total. A Large biodome with all 12 pads filled, can be run by about 6 biologists without the plants decaying much.
I only use the slow plants and usually set them up in these ratios:
3x Wheat Pads + 2x Radish Pads
3x Maize Pads + 2x Mushroom Pads
The remaining two vacant spots are either filled with Medicinal Pads or if required temporarily filled with non-starch fast growing plant pads if I'm in dire need of more food now(tm). For the most part there will be one Medicinal Pad and the last pad spot is vacant.
Both Wheat and Maize are slow-growing starchy plants, that produce 2 veggies and 1 starch each. In the long run these do lead to some amount of starch over production, but it's fairly easy to manage.
Both Radishes and Mushrooms are also slow-growing but non-starchy plants that produce 3 veggies each.
This combination of slow-growing plants, allows greater time for maintenance reducing the work load on your biologists, leaving them better time to (later on) also attend the synth-meat production once it's added.
This particular combination of plants also ensures a greater chance of making salads and later on with meat burgers, which all prevent malnutrition. (You can read about all the food recipes in the in-game help under the heading for the mealmaker)
Note however, that you can't fill your first biodome with all 12 plants right away, because you wont have enough biologists to tend all the plants. If you always go by the assumption that one biologist can only handle 2 plant pads in this setup, you should be golden all the way. Just make sure you always keep an eye on your stocks of foods and -only- add another biodome when you see your food stocks are slowly declining as you add more population.
Balancing your biologists vs. plants / synth meat is key.
In the very early game, my food production was good -- but all salads! And in retrospect I needed a little more starch and bioplastic capacity so that my medics could knock out a few med kits in a short time, so I could go back to base building. So I will probably have to find a way to get 2 processing plants quite early, one all bioplastic, the other all metal, so I can prioritize one or the other. Again, any time you give the AI a choice, it makes bad decisions.
Hopefully I learned some things. Principally, you can only build one building at a time, or make contents in one building. Otherwise your colonists are overworked at the start, plus they will make terrible choices any time you give them a chance :-) Also, when you're building an external building, you have a chance to make bioplastic and produce med kits. I balanced the power well enough to get the starport at 16 days, but probably that was too slow. There's a lot of stuff about oxygen and water production fluctuations which isn't explained in-game. It looked like I had massive overproduction of both in the day, but at night or in a sandstorm, suddenly both would be in the red, which is just as bad as losing power. For these fluctuations, I had no warning before they were catastrophic, so next time I will have to check water and oxygen every night and sandstorm, to be able to prevent problems ahead of time.
I did have 3 water towers of the largest size you can initially build, but that didn't prevent the problem. All it would do next time is give me a little more time to spot water production fluctuating down at night and do something about it. With oxygen, there's no mitigation besides removing plants, which you can't really afford to do. I also need to work out a budget for food production. Perhaps I need meals ready for about 1/5th of the colonists at any time?
Balance is key. My canteens usually have 2/4 filled with small benches and 2/4 filled with mealmakers (starting with 1-2, "slowly" building more as more colonists arrive). If your production is greater than your colony's overall transporation capacity, you will drown your colonists in carry work, thus slowing down or worse stopping everything. They will carry themselves to death if your total infrastructure is producing more boxes than the colonists are able to move from A to B fast enough.
I have managed running a colony of 110 colonists with only 2 mealmakers (I forgot to build more - heh), because the canteen was smack at the center of it all. It depends heavily where you place everything in relation to where things are produced vs. needed. The number of mealmakers is less important than where you place your canteen vs. where your base layout forces the colonists to go. The more efficient you design your base layout, the shorter the distance colonists have to travel, which increases overall efficiency of everything going on in your base so plan placement of sleeping quarters and canteens with a high degree of care in relation to your other production facilities and storages.
For food I still recomend checking the in-game help description of the mealmaker for food recipes. As long as you pick veggies that can combine into Salad at minimum, you can for the most part avoid malnutrition. Malnutrition happens when the colonists eat too many basic meals and salads are very easy to achive early on to get past that problem. Granted the randomness and chance of the game sucks and will also produce a high amount of basic meals but the occational salad will balance out the malnutrition problem. Using fast growing veggies is good while in a crunch but overall they can very easily and quickly drown your colony in veggie boxes that have to be moved around constantly, which overall reduces the efficiency of your base. Fast growing plants require twice the amount of micro-management compared to the fire-and-forget slow growing plants. In a speed run you have plenty of other things to keep track of.
For utilities like oxygen and water, check your grid frequently! Whether you choose to use the water towers or not, is up to you but personally I hardly ever use them. Instead I build enough water extractors to ensure that the water production bar is always at 2/3. That effectively removes the annoyance of water shortage.
Achieving oxygen balance should be a breeze once you've got the water production sorted. Make sure you have no more than one random dome between a biodome and an oxygen generator, preferrably have the biodomes connected to an O2 genny. Same goes for storages. Reason: mass amounts of people traffic which drains a lot of oxygen. If you keep a reasonable distance between each O2 generator (I try to keep no more than 3-4 domes between each O2 gen), you should never run out of oxygen as long as the water situation is handled.
While you are checking your grid frequently, make sure you have sufficient windmills to cover your power expenses when they are running at 100%. The grid view can tell you how much power you need to run the base; then build enough of the biggest windmills to fully cover that, plus a bit. Then assume you don't have any windmills at all and do the same for solar panels. Add as many of the biggest power collectors as you have windmills, plus half the number of solar panels. That should keep you very well in the green on the electricity at all times on the desert planet. The ratios are a bit different on the other planets.
Remember: water extractors and power collectors don't require repairing / maintenance, so you can easily build those further away from airlocks so you can keep windmills and solar panels close to airlocks. Colonists will always try to build and repair things that are closest to an airlock first (again: bad AI design imho).
In the beginning, never have more than 2 (max!) active dome / external build projects at any time. Once you get more engineers, you can slowly up the number of active builds. Limit inside builds (building machines, furniture, entertainment) to no more than 5 at a time and try to keep all the things you are building as close to each other as possible, to keep the stupidity of the colonist AI at a minimum - err I mean the distance they have to walk to a minimum :)
The "best" way to place things is to build small clusters of everything to avoid the colonists being too stupid. A colonist can reserve a mealmaker at the opposite end of the base and will walk himself to death to get there. While he has that mealmaker reserved no other colonist can use it so he's effectively blocking that mealmaker until he arrives. The key to getting through speed runs is 150% up to how you choose to place each dome, how close to an airlock each windmill and solar panel (they require repairs frequently) is and how short a distance you can achieve from mine, through processing, to storage and / or other production.
It's all about distance, efficiency and balance in this game - much more so than other similar games.
Simple rule, if you need more food pick non-starchy, need more starch pick starchy, still too much food build a bar to get rid of the excess.
edit: build lots of carry bots to keep your biologists working where they should.
Yes, that works, but that's an awful lot of trips through the airlocks which need more carry bots. Makes too much starch as well, and in places I don't want it. A food only crop for manufacturing areas, and heavy starch crop for just the bioplastic processing I like better.
http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=951235480
I'm sure it's possible to be more efficient, but because of the speed challenge, I couldn't risk turning off colony ships at all, yet still had to keep hordes of colonists happy, productive and fed. Under these circumstances, my priority was again ore and starch processing. The faster you can make these, the faster you can expand your base. They also supply efficient trading for guns and med kits (I kept semis for bot production). Food was just a case of more biodomes -- by the end I was making a lot of salads and stuffing them into the largest canteens I could make. Also, the bar is tremendous for morale if you can afford the veg. I still don't understand how food production works with many plant types -- it seems like you ought to get a lot of basic meals if the meal makers are stocked at random, but maybe they aren't. So salad may work better than I thought (worried about mass malnutrition, which if you get once will wreck your speed colony).