what some good starting traits/ethics for a new player?

[Nimnor]

hey I got the game few days ago and I've been playing around with some of the pre-made empires but now I'm looking to make my own empire so far my idea is a imperial empire that focus on forming alliances and warfare like dealing with xenophobe empires and the late game crisis

[Cryten]

Easiest? Machine empire, Driven Assimulator, Rockbreakers.
With Robots having efficient processors and luxurious and the cyborgs having Intelligent, Charismatic, Deviants and Wasteful. You can switch which ones do research and natural resources but robots generally have better resource traits unless specialised on one type of resource.

If you have no dlc or want to do a normal empire we can go with a super research build:
Species, doesnt matter
Fanatic Materialist with either authoritarian, egalatarian or militarist as the third ethic.
Civics: Technocracy, Mechanist. (Im looking forward to mechanist being an origin so we get a third civic)
Species: Intelligent, Adaptive, Deviants, slow learners. (we will breed out slow learners first).

The normal empire will focus on getting a few good planets and building tons of research while maintaining enough fleet to hold off enemies untill you outscale them. The machine empire will settle everything and focus on Alloys and research. You may want to only go about 100% over you admin cap untill you reach tier 5 techs and then spread all over the galaxy. Or just go full hog on alloys and capture everything.

[Razor Feather]

Sounds like you want to do something along the lines of militarist xenohphile, so you should probably just do that.

You can then go for fanatic xenophile, which lets you get influence free diplomacy, and gives a big opinion modifier with basically everyone, so for a super diplo heavy game its great, though its often a bit over kill.

Fanatic militarist makes taking lots of space easier.

Authoritiarian is on theme for imperial and has a strong living standard, so that could work.

Spiritualist I wouldn’t really reccomend, because playing a spiritualist like a spiritualist, ie no robots, is a huge handicap, and so its both very weak and very annoying on the rp angle.

Civics wise, Technocracy is super op, but outside that there are a number of good civics options, so honestly do whatever. If you have trouble it isn’t hard to change them mid game.

Traits wise, don’t take nonadaptive, slow breeders, or probably sedentary. Those are really super bad. Rapid breeders is really strong, and outside of that “whatever sounds good/fun to you” will probably work fine.