[jc173]

Heh beware the Rage, you mean end up tearing your hair out. Actually the TDM modpack is probably in my opinion one of the best baseline mods out there, the AI is challenging and the files are pretty well debugged, so not a lot of work is involved to get it installed and up and running. Another good addition is God Emporer's research mod. This one takes a little work to get it installed, but it will work with the TDM modpack you just need to add two lines to each of the races reasearch files and it include his modified techarea.txt file. There's other stuff you can tweak that helps out the AI, like adding resource storage to the resource extractors, space yards, and space ports. Depends on how much work you want to do etc. But for a baseline I'd start with the TDM modpack and God Emporer's research mod.