@Dawnguard try playing with the setting for Aggressive Crisis Manager, Great Khan, Realistic Pirates, and Dynamic Difficulty. This should be done at game start. Dynamic Difficulty you will have to access through Dynamic Mod Menu, or in Edicts menu

What exactly do you set in the difficulty settings? You have a number of settings. I'm also currently playing a 3500 star galaxy and in the description recommended time settings.

It also makes sense to adjust the technology duration, tradation costs and growth settings, doesn't it?

It's too bad these settings are linked in the documents folder. It would be nice to be able to mod game settings like ck3 does. Then I could just make a preset. I just play on ensign, set my end start at 2700, mid start at 2450 and game can end at 2900. I set the ACE crisis manager to active, and am sure to turn on pirate waves. That's it. I leave the other setting as is as it doesnt make sense to me to adjust them. But thats just my logic, and it might not be the right way to go. Just the way I go :)

Thanks so much for putting this modlist together. I know maintaining Stellaris mods can be a mess but I appreciate all the hard work. I know you call out some of your galaxy settings above, are there any other tweaks you'd recommend? Any of the pop growth scaling, tech cost modifiers, etc? I'm hoping to fine tune my game to just the right level of difficulty. Thanks again!