I tend to approach games like this as a story to be told rather than a game to minmax, and that's probably why my favorite part of Dwarf Fortress was tweaking the world generator...
I've made what I feel is a pretty good batch of empires with nice themes to follow for some moderate RP. 16 so far, the Dragon Empire, the empire of golems that are basically Gun Jack, the lusty Horse people and their servile Oxen, Morganites and Yang, and the Space Mermen Elves....
This last one, the space not-elves, are so far my favorite to play. They - accidentally on my part, play perfectly into a rapid expansion that rolls fairly well into a reasonably balanced jack-of-all-trades. With about 21 or so empires spawning on a large map, you bump into another empire sooner or later, and the large trade income they start with is good for spamming science vessels and Rexxing right into them. Whether the AI settles their second planet is luck dependent, sometimes they start as an advanced ai and your job is much harder, but the general idea is to snipe their homeworld, clean up the mess, and then consolidate and repeat. They're aquatic anglers with xenophobe, spiritual, and egalitarian.
I've been thinking about the conflict poised by it, and I think Elves represent a pretty good candidate for what xenophobic egalitarianism looks like. Trying to RP has been rough, and I've been thinking about how advanced technology would complicate it even further, but it comes down to agenda. We're protecting nature, not life. We open our hearts to all life, but we don't trust all sapience to uphold the tenets. I actually think the devs did a reasonable job of trying to include a flexible system of governance, that still allows people to largely disregard it if they wanted to.
I still havent completed a game, once it loses its 'spark' I tend to restart. In my last game I took out an empire, paid the marauders to help me push through a chokepoint into another civ and spun off their capital as a vassal, and was just dowed by a third as I was getting home. I'm just responding to the aggression they showed me. Fun so far.