Here's a few shots of things for my current game, I started off in 2080 as a standard TN empire.
As you can see, things ave been turned way way down. and the results are dramatic. I am now sitting on 11bn people spread across three systems, with Sol heavily populated. Point to note is that I also SM'd a few changes to my race setup, firstly being a reduction in population density, this results in Earth only able to sustain 7bn people. I find this gives me a good reason to actually get out there and make new colonies instead of just making endless auto miners.
To see what a difference the research rate makes, Mars houses the entire research for the civilization. and you can see it has 460 of them, even with all that capacity I have still only just entered the first fusion age of research. As an example, omicron shields are going to cost me 120k in research. What also destroys my progress in designing the components, you can see I currently have waiting to be started a 150k research cost engine. Granted that is maximum size, but it still means at best case I will be waiting about 5 years to develop it. Those 460 labs are actually not enough, but I then have the other limiting factor of not having enough high ranking scientists to make full use of those labs so more is pointless. This add another great way to use spare population and further drive colonial expansion. Every 5-10 years I will alter colony settings so I can get an influx from the outer colonies to my main industrial worlds so that they have extra labour, then switch back to stable so the outer colonies can grow again.
The other big thing is terraforming, I never got on well with the idea of turning things like Mars into a garden world in a year or two, even with space magic levels of tech. In my current game I started off with facilities but quickly found them lacking, as you need lots of population to run them, and so lots and lots of infrastructure. Also you need a horrific amount of terraforming facilities to allow you to develop a world inside workable timeframes. You can see the final image I have moved across to orbital terraformers, and yes that is 833 of them I have as a fleet. I struck gold on a great system with minerals and a planet that could house upto 23bn people, so invested heavily into getting it to a cost zero world. Yet even with just under 1k modules running it has take around 10 years or so to get me from a cost of 2 down to 1.6, and I estimate another 5 years to get rid of a bunch of carbon dioxide to finally get that cost zero.
The flip side to all this is that I do have an incredibly strong industry sector, Earth has almost 1bn shipyard workers, and across the entire empire I have 500m construction workers, so I tend to churn out auto mines at a rapid rate.