I mean, could I have been trying to get out this month's Rhythm Quest devlog instead of playing through yet another game of MOO2?  Yes, but man, it's fun to try different race builds and try to fight your way through the onslaught of CPU attacks into the late game.  This time I went with a dictatorship government, so massively disadvantaged compared to democracy or unification, but I was creative (get all techs at each level, very good for lategame) and subterranean (more max population).  Took a production+1 bonus so I at least had =some= production power to get me ramped up, and then large + artifacts homeworld, for even more max pop and then better early research.

Things definitely felt a little slower to get going in the beginning of the game, you can't just build a few colony bases quickly and then start looking to expand like you can with a unification + tolerant race.  The subterranean pick REALLY paid huge dividends in the small galaxy -- I just sat with my two star systems and my population grew more and more until I outnumbered everyone else and it only went even bigger from there once I started terraforming and everything.  Cloning centers really put in work here.

I do wonder if production + 1 and large + artifacts world was the right combo to take, maybe it would have been better to do something like prod+1 and research+1, or even like cybernetic and prod+1?  I did find that trying to feed all my people was taking a lot of my workforce in the earlygame and though you can take aquatic to remedy that, that leaves you without any picks to really speed up your production and/or research so I don't think you get going fast enough.  So maybe cybernetic + prod1 + creative + subterranean + dict would be alright.  Really just shows you how good unification is since you get the production plus the farming bonus...but with the 1.50improved picks you can't afford + creative [8] + subterranean [6] + unification [7]...

Playing creative is always fun because once you get to the late-game you just start having the tools to do =everything=, you research faster, produce faster, and all of your ships and weapons are better.

If you wanted to do a different sort of subterranean build, maybe something like subterranean + unification + prod+2 + large homeworld for a production monster, although that would be slow research.  Maybe an interesting one would be subterranean democracy with +2 research and artifacts homeworld, you basically have monster early research and need to rush all of the production and food technologies as well as cloning centers to boost everything else...