What you
could do is seal yourself off in your own quiet little secluded sector of space, preferably one system with lots and lots of resources (say, a former asteroid belt), take your time (decades, centuries) building a Sphereworld, filling it up with resource extractors (or, if the mod permits, homeworld legacy infrastructure
), wait until you have your investment back and more, start building a grand total of 20k warships with top-of-the-tech-tree weapons, maximum experience (training) and carefully fine-tuned strategies (simulator) and then strike..... mwuahuahuahuahua.....
Only problem is that you'll only be able to pull this off against AIs, as humans will not wait until you've built up your massive unstoppable warfleet before declaring the game over and themselves the winner. But it can still be fun taking down an empire controlling every star system but one