The problem with most mods is that by the time you got a medium sized empire you're swimming in money with almost no way to go in red.
The so called "snowball effect" makes the latter stages of the game much less of a challenge.
In XGM and XC we tried to counter this by increasing corruption faction-wide each time you conquer a foreign capital.
While still no ideal, it prevents the player from running around with a couple dozens full stacks of elites