If you haven’t played before, it’s well worth giving vanilla SOTS a good play.
Once you’ve had your fun, there are some great mods out there. I’m still playing with “Bastard Sword of the Stars”, which revamps a lot of the tech tree, the A.I, makes ships stronger and more expensive to build and makes loadouts much more important. You can’t just build 100s of the same cookie cutter ships anymore and expect to face the different races. You need armadas designed for each race and if you lose an armada it has a huge impact. I’ve yet to win a game with this mod.