Knowledge / Acoustic treatment
Checkerboard the panels, or run them continuous?
Checkerboard, weighted toward the rear of the room. The Reverberation Control Panel works above roughly 200 Hz across wide areas of wall and ceiling, and spread coverage does more than a solid block of the same quantity. Distribute it, weight it toward the back of the room, and put it around the surround speakers. A continuous slab in one place is the same money doing less work.
Checkerboard, weighted toward the rear of the room. The Reverberation Control Panel works above roughly 200 Hz across wide areas of wall and ceiling, and spread coverage does more than a solid block of the same quantity. Distribute it, weight it toward the back of the room, and put it around the surround speakers. A continuous slab in one place is the same money doing less work.
The limit that belongs with the answer: over-use dulls a room. More is not better past the target, and knowing where that point is is what a design buys you.
Setting out on site
The layout is computed for your room, and what matters is the relative positions rather than millimetre accuracy. Panels work as a pattern: the spacing between them is doing the work, so the pattern has to survive the install.
In practice that means three things. Set out from the drawing rather than by eye. Keep the pattern: if something has to shift, shift the run rather than one panel. And do not substitute your own arrangement, however reasonable it looks, because a tidier-looking layout is usually a more regular one, and regularity is the thing the design is avoiding.
This is why the layout is worth designing rather than estimating.
What to read next
The Reverberation Control Panel, or the design service if the room is not specified yet.