3 mods - which would you recommend?

If you had asked this question a few months ago, I would have said APT 1 to start with, because it is the closest to a pure bugfix. You could then try the other mods later, once you got some more experience with the game.

Now, however, I need to go with the community-based update. It's a community-driven effort to fix all the remaining bugs and balancing issues in the game that can be fixed via XML-editing. Once it is done, and has gone through QA, it will be integrated into the game by Stardock. You could call it a out-sourced official update.

Ok, thanks for pointing that out. I do have some more questions though.

Would you say that v2 of the community update is perfectly playable, or should I wait for the release?

Does the mod currently work for the campaign? I have the retail version of the Ultimate Edition (version 2.04 Twilight of the Arnor).

Will the final release of the update only be for the Steam version or will there also be a separate patch for retail users?

Well, I played the update for a good eight hours on Thu/Fri and it seems playable to me.

I think Gaunathor was about to get started on fixing it for the campaign, but he wanted to see if the tech trees were done in their current form.

If you have the retail version of the Ultimate Edition, then yes you'll be able to play it.  If you have registered it with Stardock, you'll be able to get updates from either Steam or Gamestop, depending on when you registered.

If it's already been registered (used game) then you will be able to play the update as a mod anyway.

As Marvin already pointed out, v2 is fully playable. I'm still tweaking a few things, but that's mainly for balancing reasons, and to improve the AIs research-behaviour.

It currently doesn't work for the campaigns. I want to make sure that the tech trees are finished before I start updating the campaigns, because I would prefer not having to redo everything, just because something changed again.

Just to add to what Marvin said, if you could register your retail version, you should be able to download the newest installer directly from Stardock. This installer should include the update once it is ready.

I've registered my game at the Stardock website already and I'm glad to hear that I can eventually download the update from there. However, since I want to play the campaign first, it looks like I need to wait. Thanks a lot for your answers! Also, thanks for  the work you're doing on what sounds like an awesome update. I wasn't expecting to hear of something like this when I made this thread.

I wouldn't recommend starting the game with the campaigns, because some of them do require more than basic knowledge of the game. It's better to start in sandbox, going from tiny galaxies to big ones, increasing opponent number and difficulty levels subsequently.