This AAR is really helping my game. My last attempt ended dismally with my home planet taken over, after I picked a fight with the wrong pirates. I usually play in the age of pirates as a challenge, and it usually is!
Happy to hear that its useful. Hopefully I wont be providing an example of what not to do.
I'm planning on moving on from vanilla, and starting with Haree's mod and extending from there. Does that make sense to you, or will I be better off doing it differently? Also are the mods free standing in a mods folder or whatever, so if I go back to vanilla I don't have to reinstall again?
I would definitely start of with Haree's extended mod. I hear the AI Improvement mod (which comes with a patch for Haree's mod) is also really good. I'm tempted to use it myself, but I will need to merge it into my custom theme for this play through and do some testing on my own to see if it breaks anything. I'm sure it conflicts with some of the research changes I made.
If your looking for something outside the Distant World vanilla setting, the Star Trek Picard Era mod is great. I wish they would go further in overhauling the game, rather then trying to have a balance mix of vanilla and Star Trek. But it does provide an excellent base for one to make your own personal changes. I'm in the process of (trying) to redo the tech tree to be completely ST and either rename or remove the vanilla technologies and components.
All of the mods designed for Universe should be self contained in its own folder under the customization folder in the game directory. So you can freely switch between Haree's Extended Mod, Star Trek, etc. Just be aware that some of the older mods that predate Universe are still around, and some of them do overwrite vanilla files. One example is the GEM (graphic Enhancement Mod) which overhauls the UI icons. For those mods all you should need to do is create a new theme folder (or into your custom theme) and install them in there, making sure that it mirrors the vanilla file structure. As far as I know, all the old Pre-Universe mods should be able to be used without overwriting vanilla files if you set them up this way.
Kudos to your AI manager on colonizing that Ugnari world! Every now and then, it does know what it's doing (and/or gets lucky). 
Since I tend to micromanage everything I never really noticed until recently just how far the automation has come since the original release.
