So I played Terraforming Mars with my brother and another non-Sharder non-Sanderfan friend of mine. We were playing with Corporate Era and no expansions. I was ThorGate, my brother was Mining Guild, and the other person was EcoLine. 

One really good thing that happened to me was that as one of the starting ten cards, I got Aquifer Pumping, which was arguably one of the best cards in the game. It's a blue card and costs 18 to play, and it's action is that you can spend 8 MC to get an ocean.

Extremely cheap oceans.

I also invested a lot in early game heat, energy and plant production, thanks to a really good starting hand, so I was doing a lot of terraforming, though not as much as the other two early on, who used a lot of red cards to get some fast terraforming. Both of them were ahead of me TR-wise basically the entire game.

At generation 8, @The WorldHopper Taynix showed up, and so he joined as Saturn Systems, and to compensate somewhat we started him with 33 TR (my brother, who had the most at the time, had 30 then). 

Temperature filled up really fast as both me and other-non-Sharder had a lot of heat production, and oceans followed quickly. I claimed Gardener, since I had a lot of greenery, and funded Thermalist. My brother claimed Terraformer and funded Miner, since he had like 30 steel that he barely used and no one else had more than 5. Other-non-Sharder claimed Mayor. Oxygen took a bit but we eventually got there on generation 11, the fastest TM game (generation wise) I'd ever played.

In the end, if you discounted placement VPs, my brother would've won with me close behind, other-non-Sharder trailing and @The WorldHopper Taynix far behind. Instead, since me and other-non-Sharder were the only ones who really tried to get placement VPs, I ended up winning with 64 VPs and other-non-Sharder coming second at 62, and my brother at 56 and @The WorldHopper Taynix somewhere in 40s, which was to be expected since he'd had a massive disadvantage.

'Twas a fun game.