Best Mods & settings for single-player game?

[Sockum]

I've been playing SE4 Gold now for a couple of months, and lurking on the Boards for about the same amount of time. I'm enjoying it, but I still haven't quite figured out what the best Mods and game settings are for a challenging single-player game against the AI. In particular, it seems that the AI in the late-game, once a lot of tech has been researched, is very weak and doesn't build in the numbers necessary to be competitive.

I just finished a couple of TDM games that were interesting and much more compelling than the standard AI. But the same late-game issue of not building enough powerful ships seemed to happen there as well.

I've read through the FAQ a couple of times and haven't seen anything specific to this question, so here I am:

Any advice from the pros out there about the best Mods and/or Races to use for single-player vs AI games? Any settings or tweaks recommended to make the AI more 'intelligent'? I'm not really interested in multi-player games, for a variety of reasons I won't bore you with here.

I get that creating challenging AI is difficult, so maybe there isn't a good answer to this question but I thought I'd ask and see what happens.

Sockum