As you finished your planetary generation phase, and before you start it, the game will show you some summary like this:






















IIRC, This is the only time you will see how many major and minor regimes are present!

With the 1.10.04 iteration this is now in the game under REP. -> HELP -> Planetary information - Thanks to "Call Me A N-Word" for hinting me this!
Write it down, make a screenshot, and press Start Game.

Now you should name your regime and wisely choose your profile preferences!

Depending on your planetary generation randomness, you will or will not encounter

Major regimes that start with the same setup as you - same amount of starting zones and military forces - and these are your main goals to overthrow at some point and conquer or ally with one or more for a combined vivtory.
Major regimes have fixed borders with you and respect your borders. Unless you look weak.
Or you don't protect your borders.
Or they are militarists.
Or hate your government because you allow a certain cult and they are a theocracy..
Or they find just another excuse to start an preemptive strike.

Minor regimes with a city. They are idenfiable via their suffix like nation or union or republic or something like that.
They can be farmers - peaceful guys waiting to be conquered or diplomanced.
Or raiders - looking for trouble but have weak but plentiful raider units with postapocalyptic buggies and tanks and lots of infantry.
Or hunters. Weak but plentyful and very good at ambushes and using terrain to hide their numbers.

Minor XYZ territories. These are bad. No citiy to conquer but hyper aggressive slavers/rogue AI sentinels/arachnids/mutants.#
These are immune to diplomacy.

Until you are establishing diplomatic contact, borders are fluid with all but the major regimes, as these have an established government just like you and are wary of you.

The minors will ignore your territorial claims, that is your hexes, unless you

a) go to war with them attacking their units , then they reevaluate their cohesion and need to go after you after you sent them some heads back without body,

b) play the 5PP Propose Peace stratagem on them and establish formal contact and a border from now on or

c) a minor faction wants you to establish formal contact with them and you recognizing their border via a national decision. This can boost one or two of your profiles.

As you did your profile setup - we skip this for now - You will see your Empire. Now, let us switch to the Strat map, or strategic map. Mind that we do not have any recon on anything.

You can get something like this I got on a small moon:


You see that there is a major regime border right next to the capital and one huge zone of unaligned forces. This is bad.

I rolled this planet with three majors and one minor, minimal population. This is even worse. Guess which profile preferences I chose:

Autocracy - Enforcement - Fist

Conclusion: I went full aggro. The moon is so small, I better kill this one off. I am recently playing this and I wrestled the major down to be next to his city, he has no water or food source, but another major is creeping up so I better hurry.

As my first council I chose the model council, as I got really good structures on my units and the field testing would come for sure. The infantry is upgrading to only carbines and environment suits but now has collected 20 field test points. If I win isn't sure yet, but this is a viable strategy.

WARNING: Do not play moons if you are inexperienced. You will suffer. A lot.

This is the 11 major, 81 minor world. Here the strat map:




That are four minor regimes and a major right next to me. One of the minors is a "Territory" indicating a zone without city but with nomads, slavers, hostile robots or arachnids. We want to keep these away.

What profile preferences would I chose?

I would go with meritocracy, as it comes with a +30 diplomacy bonus - we're a senate, after all - and 80 minors and 11 majors are a lot of diplomatic opportunities, commerce for the happiness and mind for better research.

Conclusion: This is a game that would benefit from a foreign affairs council as first council. It is a bit of a gamble, as there is a major bordering, but you can appease them early and getting the minors as protectorates is cheap in PP, relatively easy and gives you buffer zones against the major regimes.

I won a very similar game on a smaller planet, AAR is here: https://www.matrixgames.com/forums/tm.asp?m=4918997

It is this you should do now:

https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2307278327