Okay, does this sound stupid to you?
>plentiful partnership origin
>mercantile corporation
>gigacorp
>free traders
>build every single planet as tall as possible
>spread through seeding on other worlds
>have thereby minimal distance to other empires and lower branch office costs
>get to have lots of early first contacts
>can weasel into just about any federation
I came up with this after noticing how annoying it is to spawn next to 2 machine intelligences and another megacorp. Also, i figured it is one of the better uses for the fruitful partnership origin