Yea it'll be super fun. As a heads up I added 3 more mods I had forgotten about. Universal Resource Patch, Planetary Diversity - Glavius's Ultimate AI Patch and Automatic Pop Migration. The first 2 to fix the AI of other empires so that if we ever go to war/conquer/acquisition their planets, then their planets aren't thrown to all crap that we'd have to fix, making the AI actually competent rulers. And the last allowing automatic migration of populations (which is more realistic).
I'm building the Empire right now, and I have the beginning setting in mind as to our empire and what happened in it's history to reach this point. We're gonna be regular old humans, but once/if we get alien specie into our empire then you can happily claim those people as well should any pop up.
Edit: Also wondering if I should create a simple discord for this, though on the other hand I feel like that might be doing too much.