Generally, it's a good idea to give your Policies a look to make sure your policies are in line with what you want to do.

Some examples:

- I commonly play Authoritarian, but some of my Authoritarian factions don't actually use slavery, so prohibiting slavery makes other generally friendly empires like me a little more.

- If you're going Tall/non-aggressive and expand as far as you want to, switching from Expansionist to Cooperative makes you far safer from attacks due to the lowered border friction. Oftentimes the AI is mad at you earlygame cuz you're next to them and they don't like that.

- If you're rushing to take some choke point systems, consider closing your borders once you have them so that other civs can't sneak in science/construction ships to take systems inside territory you plan to expand into later. This allows you to only prioritize systems you need to create your "borders", and then you can slowly go back and fill out your territory later without fear of having those systems stolen in the meantime.

- Similarly, taking systems at *other* civs chokepoints that're nearby you can "trap" them if you close the borders, preventing their expansion and controlling how fast/big they get relative to you, provided you're not worried about pissing them off.

Species Rights are another thing that's worth giving a look right away. In addition to fixing "errors", it also means your economic and societal situation won't go through big changes later when you remember "oh, right, I need to do X"

Some examples:

- I have an Authoritarian Necrophage faction and the game tends to not default the non-Necrophages to slaves, meaning the Stratified Economy policy (which Authoritarian gives you) has little to no benefit unless I specifically go in and set my Default Species Rights to slavery.

- If you don't want your Leaders to be a species other than your primary species (like if they're Necrophage/Venerable and thus would live far longer than random species), setting your default species rights to Residency will prevent that.

Later in the game...

- Assimilation is another case of something you might want to set for certain species if you think you'll use them a fair amount. If you're doing Synthetic Ascension for example (and it's been awhile since I've played Synths so it could be set by default but I don't remember) it's worth checking if you're Assimilating your non-robots into robots. Obviously Assimilation isn't a "game start" thing but it's useful to remember regardless

- If you have access to the living conditions that benefit from Unemployed Pops, and have the economy to sustain it, setting species rights to things like Utopian Abundance can be a pretty big boon.

There's obviously many more examples but this section is generally specific to different empires, so I've only given a few to give an idea of what you might want to think about.

The leaders you get at game start are random (mostly, I think there's some weighting iirc).
It can help you in the long run to make sure you're using your Leaders effectively/have good leaders doing the right things as early as possible.

The earlier you have Leaders who're doing what you want them to be doing, the more XP they get, which means the better they are during their lifetime (which, if you're like me and like having really long-lived max-level leaders, can be the entire campaign). It also means you get the benefit of their trait effect longer, so you're maximizing its effectiveness.

Examples:

- Most importantly (to me anyway), getting your Scientists into your tech jobs where you want them is a big benefit. If you want to go Psionic, an early Maniacal leader researching Sociology can help get you the trait significantly faster due to the increased chance of the tech spawning. They can then be swapped for a different trait later after you've found the tech, but if you don't have Spark of Genius scientists Maniacal ain't too bad.

- Speaking of Spark of Genius, get those guys. Like ASAP. They're quite nice

- For Admirals I like to get early Admirals that have traits that either make retreats safer, lower upkeep cost, or increase sublight speed. Particularly in the earlygame when you have a lot of Corvettes, sublight speed and evasion are pretty useful, as is having fleets that keep more of their ships if they happen to lose. Every lost ship during a war that's fairly even is more alloys out of your pocket and you don't want that. Later I prefer to have a lot of Cautious (+Weapon Range) Admirals personally, but when you're just working with Corvettes or Destroyers those first 3 can be pretty useful.

- If you can, put a Scientist with the increased Anomaly Discovery Chance as one of your scout science vessels, as Anomalies are free stuff oftentimes.

- Governors that are actually useful are a bigger deal than I think some people realize. The Anti-Crime Governors are nice later if there's Crime Syndicates around, but you don't exactly need to lower crime from the start of the game, to give an example. I always prefer the science-boosting ones but take some stock of what you want to do with your capital/nearby planets and try to get a good Governor in there early on.

Science Ships, Scientists, and Surveying early in the game can be incredibly useful. This section is gonna be a long one but it's because, imo, this is one of the most important parts of your earlygame:

- If you're looking for good Scientists for your Research Trees but none show up in the pool that you want to use, buying out the ones you don't want to use for Tech creates new options in the pool. These excess leaders can be put on Science Ships to go scouting about and whatnot.

- Personally, I like to have 3-4 Science ships ASAP, assuming you have the Leaders to put in them. I have one Science Ship essentially always boosting research on my capital. It's useful for the research obviously, but in addition to that it rewards XP safely, meaning you can, for example, put the younger Scientist you intend to replace one of your Tech Scientists with when that Tech Scientist dies into a ship that's Assisting research and you won't have to replace your level 10 Scientist with a level 1 Scientist.

- As an additional option if you do the aforementioned tip, you can focus on a specific Tech tree with this method by having the Scientist that's Assisting Research have a perk that boosts one kind of Tech in the targeted tree, while you use another to do the researching. For example, let's say you want to focus on Physics: Having a Computing Scientist researching, while a Particle Scientist is assisting research, means you can just swap the two back and forth whenever there's a Tech you want that either one is proficient in. This lets you effectively have "two" Scientists who're similar level without one of them sitting around being useless, while benefiting from either trait as needed.

- The other Scientists are surveying as quickly as they can. You want to figure out where your optimal chokepoints are ASAP so you know where to expand rapidly, and a single Science Ship just isn't gonna cut it for that most games. Sending all your scientists surveying in different directions (Holding Shift while setting commands lets you queue them) helps you scout your starting situation faster, triggers more First Contact Missions quickly (which can give Influence), helps you find systems you want to "race" for, etc.

- If you're fairly confident you don't need to build a ton of Starbases rapidly in the earlygame, consider taking the Discovery tree so you can use the Map the Stars Edict early. The Edict is pricey and you don't necessarily want to do it *immediately* cuz it'll cost you ~2-3 Starbases worth of Influence, but it means you'll be able to survey faster than everyone else and probably find more anomalies. Anomalies are nice. You don't have to finish the Discovery tree first, but if you want to beat people to the punch and also get more free stuff, Map the Stars can be pretty.

- Speaking of Anomalies, don't default to studying them immediately. It's more important that you have systems surveyed so you get a good read on what your overall early situation actually is. Another benefit of this is that you can have the same scientist research all the anomalies you've found to have them level up faster. Additionally, it allows you to get all the free stuff Anomalies tend to give you all within the same short timeframe, which tends to give me more "options" overall once I start studying them thanks to the influx of resources and tech.

- As an extra note, I like to have 2 Construction ships fairly early on, so I can have one that's building Starbases and another following behind to build Mining/Research stations.This lets you expand faster and has the obvious benefit of allowing you to use the second ship to build another Starbase in a pinch if you really need to race to take a few.

Hardly a universal section but I play a lot of Criminal Syndicate so I thought I'd throw in some quick tips that apply to Megacorps in general:

- You have a lot of Energy Credits early, which means getting good Leaders is quite a bit easier than it is for most other faction types. Don't be afraid to buy some so they can start gaining XP as soon as possible.

- I generally immediately go into the Marketplace and start doing monthly Mineral and/or Alloy purchases. Not much, but realistically you don't *need* all that Energy right away, and Minerals or early Alloy income can be substantially more useful than an excess of Energy Credits

- Worth noting that only one Branch Office can exist on any given planet, and additionally that other Megacorps as well as non-diplomatic factions can't have Branch Offices in their stuff at all. What this means is that if you're a Megacorp and there's another Megacorp nearby, you're racing to put Branch Offices on the best planets. Don't neglect setting up Branch Offices for long or you just won't have any good options left.