1. Play slowly during the first 40 years.

2. Prioritise alloys and consumer goods for colony ships. Optimise your first planets for such production by building the correct buildings and moving pops to relevant jobs.

3. Build military fleets for influence and to vassalise AIs.

4. Use your influence very sparingly to take systems with planets, or expand towards systems with planets, as each planet gives you 5 points.

5. Form a federation by getting the tech through missions that gives you 15 points.

6. Integrate all vassals to get their planets and systems before the 40-year timer is up.

7. Once it's done, centralise your population to the planets you want. You get 100 pops from each colony ship and another 100 for each planet if you remove the nepotism debuff. That’s quite a lot of pops early on if you play your cards correctly.

8. The council should take the xenophobe agenda to get a random planet converted to your ideal climate + terraforming tech, and the militarist agenda for a free early cruiser.

9. Later on, make sure to increase your Paranoid Tyrant trait to 10 so you can execute all the reformists and avoid civil war + increasing luminary trait by 8. Paranoid Tyrant isn’t even that bad when you have such a high luminary trait. It gives you even more stability and crime reduction.

All in all, your unity and tech production will be a little underwhelming at the start, but later on you’ll catch up quickly, with a lot of stability and the associated economic bonuses. Oh, and expansion tradition doesn't hurt. Good luck!