As someone who always plays conventional starts, and who has played with those exact settings before, few things before you get too far into it:
A) have more than 5 labs in the beginning. You have so many essential techs to research in a conventional start that 2 or 5 is just not going to cut it and building a respectable amount of labs will take decades. During which time those two NPRs, who already are ahead of you with a TN start, will be exploring and growing and researching.
B) Do not turn Invaders on at game start! There is nothing preventing a wormhole appearing in Sol or in the very first system you jump into. If stuff starts happening when you're at TL1, TL2 or even TL3, it's pretty much end game right there. Remember that the game gives you no mercy in that regard. Even if they do not appear right next to you, they can slow down the game updates to a crawl because they are extremely efficient in exploring, which means they can activate new NPRs faster than you or existing NPRs can.
C) Having two NPRs at launch with 10% chance of activating further NPRs seems like a logical challenge but what it means in a conventional start is that the risk of you being stuck in a 5-second loop for days and days even before leaving Sol is high. As said above, the NPRs always have a TN-start, so they will start exploring right away. When they meet each other or activate new NPRs, risk of war is high. Nothing ruins your game quicker than getting stuck in the 5-second update loop because two NPRs are duking it out somewhere you don't even know about.
So, my recommendations:
1) Turn Invaders off. You can turn them on later in game if you want the extra challenge.
2) Boost population to at least 500 million, preferably 1 billion.
3) Have at least 20 labs to start with.
Feel free to ignore all that of course, my anecdotal experience might be an outlier and your experience could be entirely different!