I've been meaning to check that mod out for a long time. It's extremely well done, from what I gather, and I was a big fan of Birth of the Federation way back in the day.
In other news, I finally had someone declare war on me outside of the War in Heaven. But... it was just because the Contingency corrupted the ancient caretakers, and they declared war on me despite being on opposite sides of the galaxy. Fighting them has been a challenge since only one empire has built a gateway "near" them at about 400 days of travel away, and I'm just lucky that the crisis is going so I could even use said gateway due to everyone opening their borders.
The Contingency has been surprisingly potent this time around. I increased the crisis difficulty to 2x so it would fare better against the AI and actually expand some, but it really hasn't done a great job of that. On the other hand, the Contingency has beaten me pretty soundly in individual combats. I've had to replace 75%+ of my navy after each sterilization hub since my 400K worth of ships barely beats their 300K defense fleets. I thought I'd do better since my ships are penetration geared and stack dark matter deflectors for defense, but the ships keep doing stupid things like focusing on the AI cores while the defense fleet slaughters them. I've had to rebuild my entire navy and return to sterilization hubs twice to finish them off because my badly depleted fleets were 1200+ days of travel from the nearest ship yard for reinforcements when two or more roaming fleets wandered in to the hub system while they were bombing it. I probably should have jump drived away but I wasn't sure that the drives would engage in time and didn't even try it.
I also probably should have just built way over my naval cap and ignored the negative energy production, since that beats spending 100K+ minerals to replace my ships.