So, I tested another game with your mod active to see if it was just me being in a lucky position that I overwhelmed the AI so easily but sadly I have to say, it was more the "imbalance" of the mod than my lucky starter position. Again, I was able to overwhelm the AI in a few decades and was able to subjugate half the galaxy before the mid game started.

A few things I personally would heavily rebalance:

- "The Trip" even where you can abduct 2 pops from other empires, it just happens too often and has a too high chance to work, since pops are the most important thing in Stellaris, this makes your economy skyrocket in just a few decades, the AI will never have the chance to recover from that (I thing the pops are actually taken away from them?)

- The random shroud bonuses that you get outside of the normal shroud usage are too strong, especially when being spiritualist and they also happen too often. It sometimes happens that I have the resource production buff, pop growth buff and ship speed + fire rate buff active at the same time and once they ended I can chose one of them again. The bonuses shouldn't be that high in my opinion (+100% ship speed and fire rate is just overkill against any AI difficulty, same goes for +150% resource production if it happens like 4 times in a single game year)

- The negative effects from failed shroud events (The nightmares event for example) do not make up for the insane bonuses you get, the -20% happiness are nothing compared to the bonuses. Funnily, the times a shroud entity spawned, it always happened in an AI empire instead of my own territory, weakening the AI even more

- The new criminal syndicate buildings are nice but crime is still too easy to fend off. One upgraded precinct house is mostly enough to shut down 3 buildings, even the Crime Raid edict didn't really help much.

I really like the idea of expanding the Criminal Syndicate mechanics and your ideas are seriously awesome, I like having events happening throughout the game, this makes the game less monotone and more interesting, I also like the idea to expand the shroud events, you did a great job at writing all the story texts for every event but currently, the imbalance in the values that some events provide is killing this mod for me, since it makes the game far too easy even on the highest difficulty, sorry :(

I know that's a lot of criticism but I really love the idea of the mod, since I don't know if balance was one of your considered points (which is totally legit if it wasn't, it's your project and you can do whatever you want) I just wanted to give this feedback so in case you are going to change numbers that you might look at these points.