You could just slow down your planet conquests

引用自 Lord Adorable：

Out of curiousity, am I the only one who finds the single planet start of the infinities GC much easier than the actual campaign?

It's much easier imo:
1) You're not surrounded on all sides by enemies who will attack.
2) No "orphaned planets" that are cut off from your main territory. Such planets are generally useless unless you can get to them quickly or retreat off of them. Most of the time I just sell off every unit and building from isolated planets and forfeit them
3) More direct control over the shape of your forces early on; regular GC's starting units are rather awkward at times, often with ships or ground units that have questionable usefulness. Likewise, planets are often built in a weird way, like having multiple different factory types on a non-threatened world, when it's better to devote a planet solely towards one type of factory or another to mitigate production times.
4) A much longer "grace period" before you're in any real danger of being attacked. If you're not careful, yes the enemy can overwhelm you in FTGU, but the neutral worlds between you and the enemy serve as a decent buffer to hold them off long enough for you to establish a solid territory and production.

Still, TR is pretty good with its faction distribution in regular GC. There are some exceptions like most of NR starting way towards the south with 2 worlds waaaay far out at the northeast corner which will probably take a while to get to, or maldrood having 2 core worlds they can't really do much with. Even imperial remnant, starting right in the center at the mercy of every other faction, has a fairly cohesive border.

In FotR, however, I pretty much exclusively play FTGU with some submods to make it more interesting(adding in heroes, and making the map the same scale as a medium full GC.) The starting planets in FotR progressive GC is more scrambled than eggs at waffle house for both factions. You got chunks of CIS and Republic worlds all sorts of mixed together in such a way that the first whole half of a GC is just trying to consolidate territory and pool things together.