I finished an early version of a mod that makes a number of tweaks to the game aimed at accommodating play on insane maps.  Like Naselus noted in his IAB mod, the game really needs wildly different settings for different maps without any easy way of accomplishing them short of massive overhaul of stuff.  The mod ins designed for play on insane with loose clusters & occasional/common planets... As a result, it goes in very different different directions than IAB.  With that said, it should work on just about any map type or density that eventually reaches a point where research progress becomes trivial... but there will be a lower bound point where tech costs eventually escalate too high (likely one of the smallest map sizes depending on planet density)

designed forany map type, but targeted for  less dense map types (ie not iab), but works fine on those too in my experience.

Tech speed is too blunt with normal/slow making later game too easy and very slow crippling the game for the first 75-150ish turns depending on race on larger maps effectively putting it's use in the same general usefulness as a hammer to fix the screw holding the arm on your eyeglasses. an awful lot of this work would have been unneeded if we could configure tech costs by tech age  in techagedefs.

Tech research costs modified as follows (generally rounded up to nearest int) a based on age the tech falls in

• AgeOfExpansion 1.25x Base
• AgeOfWar 1.75x  Base
• AgeOfAscension 3x Base
• AgeOfVictory 10x  Base.
• the additional cost per starbase beyond the free 20 is now 8 credits each as a # pulled from thin air as a starting point.
•  StarbaseRange bumped from 5 to 8. their aura's range was so small it made certain types of starbases of dubious value
•  starbases now need to be now closer than 10 hexes apart (up from 5), again a plucked from thin air starting point 
•  minimum colonizable planet quality is PQ4 (down from 6), this helps build range bridges early on & works well with synthetic races.
•  added a +25% multiplier modifier for life support range to cargo hullsso trade is more usable early on before mid/late in the tech tree
•  bumped max range colonies can supply Shipyards (MaxSponsorDistanceWithNoPenalty) by 50%... Up from 6 to 9... Again a starting point pulled from thin air, this works great on insane maps, especially less dense ones 
•  set the colony module to +50% life support range to help the ai colonize more as a lot of the colony ships are on smaller hulls
•  did the same with the survey module to encourage ai to keep looking outside their borders more zealously
•  building a constructor module on a ship is 4x more expensive than before (up to 108 from 27)
•  telling a constructor to build a starbase now starts the starbase with 3 modulepoints to build improvements after using one to build the starbase itself rather than the default of 1 to minimize constructor spam
•  interstellar travel, xeno economics tourism, & a couple others now have a significantly higher priority for the ai early on
•  modified build priorities for what to build on specialized planets to look something closer to what players would build.  Although the ai only working at an empire level rather than planet by planet, this will be less effective than the  player equivalent likely running around 100% on the eco/mfg/research wheel.
•  yor have a lower priority on manufacturing collectives & are less likely to shoot themselves as a result some other races might need similar on their respective equivalents.
• made the early generally want a larger buffer, & run at 0/50/50 more frequently for the very early game. with brad having openly stated that one of his ai goals is to twist the ai scripts into something capable of working in smaller individual "theaters" rather than empire wide, this seemed like the best path for now given the impact of the adjustments. 
•  Modified how far the ai is willing to send out a fleet of warships into enemy territory. This means that the ai will actually attack you more than a few hexes from their border after declaring war
•  changed how often the ai will consider junking an old ship, this means that the ai will probably come at you with.  Unfortunately,it means the ai might sometimes despawn a colony ship, but they are more aggressive at expanding now anyways & that's ok.  It also means that when the ai declares war on you, better ships than a wave of old trash will eventually be coming your way..
• Improved the ai's selection of what to build on planets so specialized worlds don't have half their tiles with random buildings. They will now probably look a lot more like your specialized worlds.
• 8/24/15 update: This was such a small update that I decided to push it out instead of waiting for more changes.  Rather than colonization events giving you a flat +10 of your choice in ideology points, you now get +.2/turn based on your choice for each planet.  At 5 planets of the same choice , you get +1/5  turns, at 10 you get +2/5, 15 gets 3/5, etc based on choices
• 9/15/15 update:

• made compatible with 1.3

• instead of directly editing the ResearchCost for all ~400 techs in all 10 tech trees, I opten to use the new(?) techinflation stats. This results in slightly different progression, but it seemned pretty good in testing. devstream seems to indicate that these & other things will be set on a per mapsize basis in the future.

• changed the starbase spacing again (from 10 to 12) to make it more difficult to overlap stupid amounts of starbases on things. Since the spacing is >rangem this probably limits it around 4

•  Changed the max range colonists can be pulled from a sponsor planet to a ship to accomidate the larger sponsor range. I actually made it slightly higher than the MaxSponsorDistanceWithNoPenalty with the MaxPopulationSourceDistance = 10 to allow for some decay military production from a sponsor feeding colonists
  
  

•  CulturePerTurn structure changes .1 to .35, .2 = .75, 1= 2

•  colonizationEvents with a negative/penalty other thabn -100 credits have had their ideology/turn changed to .75/turn 

•  colonizationEvents that give -only- a penalty other tghan -100 credits give 1/turn

•  In my own testing, I found the differing weightingto make the choices less of a "duh of course that one".

• Unfortnately, I've been unable to find a target for the culturePerTurn that changes hands when the planet changes hands _and_ gives the ideology points to the faction to make them usable planet might assign them, but they do no good there

•  Paul confirmed on the devstreamthat he didn't think it possible to spawn a specific improvement on a colony via a ColonizationEvent. If that were different, I would _like_ to grant +1 tiles and a structure giving the bonus(es) selected on that tile so they were easier to see on a per planet basis. it would also solve the problwm of planets not carrying over their ideology choice after they change hands

•  WartimeFocusSectorRadius in GalCiv3AIDefs has been set to 256 for a while bow, but I'm finally noting it so I can quit having to remember the setting

• Military starbases give +25% moves to you(allies?) and -40% moves to enemies

• Mining starbases give +50% moves to you(allies?) and -20% moves to enemies

• Culture, mining, & military starbase rings are no longer exclusive with each other, only economic ones 

•  I suspect these mining/military starbase bumps might be too good combined with the no longer exclusive nature, but will wait for feedback & more testing

• •  again lowered PlanetClass_Colonizable, this time to 5 with PlanetClass_Dead set to 3, Great (12, and Fantastic (16 were unchanged))

  •  raised the returns for syntheticlife's assemmbly (yor tech tree) by ~50%  figuring 1.3.x or 1.4 will have more mathematically obtained numbers

• added the fololowing PopulationCapYor modifiers 
  +50% barren world
  +50% aquatic world
  +50% frozen world
  -25% radioactive world
  *** Ignoring colonizationEvents, many of which have significant effects that stack with the other multipliers allowing truely silly happy nonsymntheticpop on a world covered in farms & entertainment(starbases). food has the following vanilla modifiers with many having a growth effect too so those numbers seemed easily justified:
  -25% desert world
  +25% breadbasket world
  +50% Thin atmosphere world
  +1 pop floodplain
  +1 pop grassland
  +2 pop wetland
  +3 pop wildgrain
  +1 food +2 pop to neighbors MonsatiumDeposit
  +5% growth global ArtocarpusViriles_Dec

   

• Ignoring colonizationEvents, many of which have significant effects that stack with theother multipliers allowing truely silly happy nonsymntheticpop on a world covered in farms & entertainment(starbases). food has the following modifiers with most having a growth effect too:

• -25% desert world
  +25% breadbasket world
  +50% Thin atmosphere world
  +1 pop floodplain
  +1 pop grassland
  +2 pop wetland
  +3 pop wildgrain
  +1 food +2 pop to neighbors MonsatiumDeposit
  +5% growth global ArtocarpusViriles_Dec

The latest version of the mod itself can be downloaded here!