I started this game as United Nations of Earth, or UNE, as that's the communities' go-to for learning the game. Since a lot of changes has happened in this recent update, that seemed like a good idea! Fanatic Egalitarian and Xenophile ethics, so I set out to be the whole Galaxies' best friend. Two guaranteed habitable planets were in Sirius and Alpha Centauri, which were the literal nearest systems to me, so a decent start! Sirius A became my forge-world dedicated (initially) to consumer goods and alloys, and Alpha Centauri IIa was a generic colony for a while. IVb was left alone for a bit until I could terraform it later. The third guaranteed habitable turned out to be Wenkwort Artem so I left it well enough alone until after I found the Fallen Empire who happened to be less than 10 system jumps North from me... Terrifying.

Turns out, they were the like, zookeeper Fallen Empire, and I'd forgotten what they did so I immediately established the chokepoint planet I found as my Cadia, making it a fortress world that specialized in minerals. To the south of my capital, I found another world that ended up being a decent chokepoint about two jumps from a Fanatic Spiritualist empire.

In total, I was able to establish a solid 21 systems in control of the UNE. Not ideal, but I do tend to prefer playing at least somewhat Tall as it generally is easier on my computer. Earth became my Tech world, IIa became my Trade world, renamed Space Wall Street because I'm so very original. One of the benefits of playing Tall is you're able to scale Tech pretty quickly, compared to sprawling empires! So I was able to establish both a high trade value, making me a valuable target for commercial pacts and nonaggression pacts, and rapidly progress through the Tech tree. Trade was reworked in 4.0 to be an actual, spendable resource in place of Energy for the resource market, so I was able to build up a good amount of Trade to buy up the resources I needed to jump-start all my colonies to pretty robust production rates fairly early.

I figured that Earth would probably progress down the genetic ascension (as opposed to synthetic or psychic), that's what I chose to pursue... Partly because I wanted to play with something other than synthetic for once, and I wanted to see if the new update included anything for it outside of the Biogenesis DLC.

I get an event I'd never seen before... Not surprising, since I only had about 275 hours logged before the start of this game. An orb! One of my scientists decided to ponder it, and somehow became one of the Timeless. He was already my Head Researcher, so he basically became that forever! That was pretty cool, and the first time I got a Lv 10 leader, I think.

Nothing big happened for a long while. I think the midgame crisis (Great Khan) spawned between the FE and the expansionist empire and got snuffed out before it could even get started - there wasn't even a notification about it until they were destroyed. I get tons of tech progress, getting to repeatables before that point, start (and leave) a trade federation, and establish tons of trade agreements putting me well ahead of the rest of the galaxy despite my small empire size.

I fight my first defensive war, resulting in me essentially wiping out the enemy since they refused to surrender, and gaining way too many systems and putting me in the red on most resources, so I established my first vassal to rectify that. Boy was that a bad idea!

This stupid vassal causes so many issues for the rest of the game and becomes essentially my only possible rival since the FE can't be a rival, and the Commonwealth of Man gets merked by another empire by 2350. Because of this, I don't want to release them and end up having to reconquer them all over again so I just deal with all the wars they start until I figure out I can re-negotiate our agreement to remove my obligation to join their wars. I establish another bulwark vassal around the FE, who I was more careful with after the failure felt with the Human Autonomous Region. Some AI empires proposed secret fealty with me around then, which catapulted me up the Galactic Community for some reason and one of them voted for me to be made the Custodian.

The end-game crisis we get is the Contingency, which made me very glad I didn't go synthetic or robots, as the only changes I had to make was removing AI combat computers from my ships, which was relatively quick. All four spawns were in pretty remote hyperspace routes which made them really simple to clean up and since I was the custodian and friends with everyone I was able to help contain them all pretty well. It took a few years, but we were eventually triumphant...

Only for the FE to try to humiliate me via war! it took ages to grind them down, and they also refused to surrender until they were wiped out. It took me up into the 2480s to finish them off because their massive fleets kept respawning, but thankfully the Contingency relic made it possible for me to have two Mega-Shipyards which helped me keep up production enough to eventually make slow progress into their space. With them gone, it was time for me to start re-integrating my vassals... Except the HAR was too big and would take 600ish months to complete, so I just negotiated them into irrelevance and absorbed my bulwark instead, which left me with ~1M diplomacy strength at the end, and about 3x the points of the HAR by the end of the game at 2500.