Please advise on mods and getting back into Civ6

[Gehennas]

Hi. I've stopped playing soon after GS release, because after all the patches the game didn't meet my expectations. However, as a long-time Civ series fan, I am still looking for a way to love this game. So I thought maybe it is time to try again (especially with the secret Ctulhu cult)
I am not into the hardcore optimized approach (and I play singleplayer only), and with Civ5 I usually had fun playing on King with occasional attempts on Emperor. Even after many hours I sometimes found myself destroyed by Aztecs who managed to get planes earlier than me. Unfortunately Civ6 couldn't captivate me as much as its predecessor, due to the following:

1. AI is completely brain-dead. It wasn't good in Civ5, but at least it could overwhelm you with larger/better force and pursue certain vicroty types. In Civ6 it is completely helpless. Sometimes it may defeat you in the very beginning while outnumbering you 5 to 1 thanks to bonuses, but after that it is completely harmless.
2. Game pace feels really weird. Units are outdated faster than you can mass-produce them, research/culture progress is extremely quick, while you always starve for production. Maybe I am doing something wrong and need a good tutorial, but AI also suffers from this, since it is usually unable to have any standing army in the midgame, unless it is serously lags behind in tech.
3. Tuning difficulty does basically nothing aside from making the beginning of the game more difficult and forcing you into early unit spamming. As a result, each game starts with an early war and then you just play solitaire, while AI is unable to do anything.

As I understand, nothing has change in this regard since GS release, so I don't get my hopes up. Instead I am thinking about playing with some mods, but there are a lot of them out there in workshop and I probably need some advice. I've looked though various mod lists, so I have some ideas about my options, but I will be glad if someone says if my expectations are correct.

1. There are "Real Strategy" and "AI+" mods that seem to improve AI, but I fail to understand the actual impact on the AI effectiveness aside from the increased agression in AI+. Also, according to comments, they seem to make AI worse in some aspects. Can anyone recommend any of these mods?
2. Just a brief search shows that there are at least four popular mods slowing down the game: "Slower pace", "8 ages of pace", "Real science pace", "Extended eras". Will any of it make eras long enough to have spare production for units and/or city projects?
3. There are few mods targeting starting AI stack and introducing better scaling instead, but they seem to be quite unpopular, as I see. Also, some of other mods (like Slower Pace) include the same changes. I don't know what to choose here, so I am open to any recommendations.

Thank you in advance and sorry if my English is confusing sometimes.

 

[iammaxhailme]

Doesn't really help with AI, but two mods I never play without are Terra Mirabilis (rebalances + adds some new natural wonders) and the Civ V environmental skin (makes the game look waaaaay better)