Here's what I suggest for settings when starting a game with the collection. These are only my recommendations, and are by no means requirements. This is intended for players unfamiliar with the mods in the collection.

I've commented on everything below and made a screenshot of each settings window. Steam does not allow embedding the images directly into the Discussion post, so here's an album containing all screenshots:

Image Album - All Dogepack Settings[imgur.com]

Stellaris Galaxy Settings
- Logistic Growth Ceiling: 5000x/Maximum (This is important)
- Growth Required Scaling: At least 0.1 (If you set this lower, it is very likely your game will become unplayable in the mid 2300's)
- Crisis Strength: At least 3x (Lower values will likely result in crisis being relatively weak. Note that you can change their strength during the game with the mod menu -> difficulty settings)
- Every other setting can be set for taste, but here's my personal settings.
https://i.imgur.com/bT4Ke9N.png

Planetary Diversity - Randomize
https://i.imgur.com/JoFsM8S.png

Gigastructural Engineering
- Guarantee all unique systems.
- Guarantee Katzens
- Guarantee Blokkats
- Set Galactic Core to Aeternum
https://i.imgur.com/I1uAas9.png

Coop: Start in Teams - No changes
- Note that you can create premade federations or teams using this system before the game starts. If you want to team up with half the galaxy and have the other half as a federation as well, you can do that here. This is entirely optional and meant as a choice for players rather than something that is recommended.
https://i.imgur.com/Shw9w90.png

Ancient Empire - No changes (Don't know enough about the mod yet)
https://i.imgur.com/8ij2uV2.png

Cult Factions (May not appear for all players) - Use the custom factions
https://i.imgur.com/OvJuqDC.png

Shroud Rising - 100% chance for Eye of Terror
https://i.imgur.com/c89K64P.png
https://i.imgur.com/dHaCh6H.png

Guilli's Planet Modifiers
- High Modifiers (This will create more planet diversity when colonizing, helping to determine what type of world you want)
- Old Galaxy (This will make precursor and high-value modifiers more common. These help mix up the gameplay with more impactful planet modifiers)
https://i.imgur.com/OzX3iJh.png

Aggressive Crisis Manager - Enable Crisis Manager
https://i.imgur.com/lYuAnq1.png
https://i.imgur.com/SNMz8am.png

APSR
- Battle of Capitals preset mode
> This will create a unique world in most starting empire systems.
> This helps with natural expansion, ensuring bad RNG (like scanning a bad habitability planet system first) is not a severe detriment during the early game.
https://i.imgur.com/rXTddnO.png
https://i.imgur.com/XoorIvI.png
https://i.imgur.com/AnLUyco.png

Rise of Cosmic Industry
- Disable Realistic Development (This is extremely out of balance. Incorrect usage can impede your empire progression for years, and abusive usage can create megastructures in seconds)
- Disable Automatic Factory (Performance concerns)
- Disable Space Exploitation (Performance concerns)
- Optionally, disabling Shipping Costs.
> This creates an artificial cost on goods that a planet is not able to produce for itself.
> Shipping costs benefit empires with balanced planet productions.
> It improves AI progression as a result since they naturally balance their planet production.
> This also creates a drain on economy in the end-game when megastructures take effect, making the megastructures into a counterbalance for a highly specialized population rather than free resources.
> Personally, I keep Shipping Costs enabled.
https://i.imgur.com/Z4XuHLa.png

Real Space - No Changes
https://i.imgur.com/4yk1AY7.png

Terraforming Candidates - Quite a few.
https://i.imgur.com/49L37nb.png

Ancient Cache of Technologies - No Changes
https://i.imgur.com/HnedwD8.png