My recommendation would be the XTended Mod, for starters; especially if you're a combat-oriented type. If you're especially masochistic, you might try Improved Khaak and Improved Xenon; it makes the two hyper-destructive alien races all the more terrifying, and causes them to attempt to conquer and settle in systems they invade. To counter that, Race Response Fleets makes the defense fleets of the five main races more responsive to major threats such as pirates, Xenon, Khaak, and the player (
) so they can hold off the invasions more effectively.
Do note, though; all of these scripts and the XTended mod are definite resource hogs. If your computer is not quite the beast from the east, I'd try vanilla first, then install scripts/mods as you go to see what your machine can handle, and what you feel is necessary to make the game better.
As far as pure aesthetics, I also recommend Imp's cockpit mod (it's in Ego's download section) and any of the improved GUI mods. They're XTM compatible, too.
Finally, make sure you're patched to version 2.5, and download the Bonus Pack. That's the first thing I'd do.
And finally finally, a lot of the scripts make considerably more sense if you play the game for a while first and find a few things that you think are wrong or need work; then you'll come back here and say, "hey! Here's something that fixes that!"
With that in mind, the first thing I would recommend is going 100% vanilla to start off, and play til you feel you know the dynamics of it a bit. Then add what you feel would improve your game to your liking. If you're totally set on a deflowered game from the start, though, my list would be-
XTended
Imp's Cockpits
Race Response Fleets
Improved Khaak
Improved Xenon
Bonus Pack.
RRF, IX, and IK are very combat-oriented, but they all have tweakable difficulty levels and settings so you can tone them down (or up) a lot if need be.
Welcome to X, btw ^^
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