if history is a reference, then you only need the lvl 4 campus for the wonder tech.
So you could as well collect resources with a smaller campus and just upgrade the last lvl just before wonder tech while you trash some factories allready.
There's another thing though too - the statement was that we would **need** (whatever that means) a 10x10 campus to fit all the buildings. That means we will **need** to have 4 of each faculty.
Goods production doesn't really have any requirements, beyond that you build 1 of each faculty. For comparison, you could have gotten through Wood Elves (very slowly) with only 1 of each grafting site, and 1 forest fabrication.
Goods storage does have a requirement. You needed a L4 portal to hold the goods for Dwarf, Fairy, Orc, and Wood Elves wonder techs. So I expect that Goods storage will require a L4 campus. This requirement could be minimized as described above, or ignored with the use of diamonds.
But the questline also imposes a requirement on buildings. Someone mentioned above that 4/4/4/3 worked well for them in wood elves. However, the questline imposed the requirement that you have 6 steel, 6 marble, and 4 planks grafting sites - all at the same time. The questline also forced you to have 4 forest fabrications, though not at the same time as all those grafting sites. You cannot make it through the wood elves chapter (in the sense that I try to get through each chapter) without building to at least 6/6/4 grafting sites.
Also, if the campus was smaller, it wouldn’t provide enough space to place the faculties around that.
What follows is predicated on taking Muf-Muf at his word - having the L4 campus be 9x9 would have made the chapter, as built, impossible.
Muf-Muf's statement entails that we require 4 of each faculty (otherwise the 10x10 size would not be required as he stated). But the only way that we would ever *require* a certain number of each faculty is the questline requirement.
So from Muf-Muf's statement, we will have to have 4 of each faculty to progress the questline. While technically, we could just ignore the questline until some bug moves us past it (as happened with a recent bug), those who want to move through the plot are going to have to install 4 of each faculty.
Personally, I'd think that the guest race chapters would be more fun if we were allowed more choice in how large we wanted the guest race establishment to be, while still allowing players to follow the plot. In the case of the wood elves, that would have meant not placing a plot requirement for 6 marble/6 steel/4 planks grafting simultaneously. In the case of the Sorcerors and Dragons, that would mean not requiring 4 of every faculty together. I love the look of the faculties, I'm looking forward to having them, especially the more Lovecraftian appearing levels. But I find 372 squares of sorcerers and dragons to be a little ridiculous, especially when this unprecedented size is tied to the demands of not having a settlement road, but having to connect everything to the campus directly.
For comparison, even if you kept all the required production buildings, that leads to a settlement size of 218 (36 x3 for grafting sites + 64 for forest fabs + 20 for the glade + 26 allotted for forest trail) for the wood elves. In addition to the rigid geometric constraints, the sorcerers and dragons settlement is more than 170% of the size of the prior one. For laughs, at this rate of growth, we can expect the next guest race to take up 634 tiles.
