My goto race is Scavenger.  Getting early notifications of shortages/surpluses is really powerful, letting you either buy up a bunch of whatever is about to be short, or sell down your stockpile of whatever is going to get surplused, and then buying it back for super cheap after the price crashes.  If you can get away with not going aluminum they are even better, allowing earlier production of the $$ stuff like glass and food.  More frequent access to the Black Market is quite nice too, in MP games I can often pick up 3-4 extra claims for fairly cheap

I hate playing against Scientific, they're resistance to sabotage is stupid good, and they're ability to get early Slant Drilling and get those sweet 100% bonuses is really powerful, and hard to beat.

My least favorite race is Robotic.  While not having to worry about Life Support is nice, not having access to those items later kinda sucks as they can often be quite valuable offworld.  Additionally they still require Fuel to launch Offworld stuff which is totally not keeping with their theme.  They will also find it quite difficult to get any chemicals before level 5, so upgrading and tech is kind of out of the picture.  Finally, you have to use most of your early claims just setting up your infrastructure that its hard to make any $ selling stuff.  You 100% NEED a source of Iron, Silicon, and Carbon early, aluminum at times as well, as well as power and maybe if you're lucky some electronics.  The only one of those items that will really make you any $ is Energy, but that can quite often bottom out in price early (Electronics can be valuable, but as previously stated the amount of infrastructure needed to start building Electronics is so high that it will be difficult to produce a significant surplus of Electronics until much later in the game).  Unless there is literally like 1 patch of water on the map, I tend to stay away from playing these guys.