Life slowly continues to roll along, in whatever path it may choose.  Sometimes I feel like I'm done trying to fight it anymore.

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Let's start with some cool good news -- I cleared Lugdunum, one of the hardest (if not the hardest) Caesar 3 levels, in my Augustus very hard difficulty playthrough!  This one has been a long time in coming, so I feel proud to finally be able to cross it off the list.  The next mission is Tarsus, which seems to be set in a desert province, but honestly I might actually give Lugdunum another try or two, just to prove that I really understand how to beat it well.

There were a couple more things that I learned through the process:

First is that you really just can't have random tents lying around for labor in Augustus.  Because of how the city sentiment/crime rework functions, they'll just continually spawn protestors/thieves and it'll be a bad time.  You can of course keep a contingent of tents around at the city entrance while your city is still getting up and running, but it'll have to be torn down at some point, otherwise they'll just continually spawn robbers/looters, and though they will take a while, they DO travel to your main city and take goods from granaries/warehouses.

The other option is to make sure you keep your roads concise for that tent area and have enough prefectures such that the looters will all be taken down, but probably better to just feed those people if you can...

One issue is that all of the plateau farmland needs to get labor from somewhere, and that means some houses have to go on the plateau itself.  Usually you'd want to just use a few tents...but like I said, that's going to cause problems.  Luckily there's enough space on the plateaus that you can provide some basic needs to evolve them to hovels, at least, by adding a market and a temple, and that will suffice.

There is space for quite a lot of farms on the plateau, and it probably doesn't make sense to have all of those farms transporting food all the way to the entrance to the plateau area (that's too far of a distance to really be efficient), which means you should probably have a housing block on the far end of the plateau.  In my playthrough this actually ended up being the block where I had 3 villas (along with the requisite foods and warehouses and such), but it's probably also possible to have this simply be a block of small insulae and instead use the 9 farms on the southern island to feed the villas (?).  I might try that strategy out in my next run.  Those 9 farms can probably also sustain one =small= housing block of small insulae, but not much more than that, so be careful not to stretch that too thin.

Space is at a premium in the area near the natives (you'll have to squeeze two or so housing blocks somewhere in that area) so for religion you probably want all of your oracles / nonessential temples to be either interspersed with the native huts, or somewhere completely different like the entrance to the map.

Unfortunately oracles DO require engineering posts, so putting them near the entrance to the map unfortunately means that you'd have to feed some people near the entrance to the map, which would be challenging as you'd either have to have a market that "tosses" food across the cliff boundary, or import food there.  Interspersing them throughout the native villages is OK but you also probably need to run aqueducts through there, and getting labor access / engineers there might be tricky.  Importing food is pretty bad at scale but for an isolated situation where you only need to feed a few houses it might actually do just the trick, so I might try that and place those houses on the eastern corner of the map since there's easy water access there.

Another interesting option might be to rely on mausoleums, since those can't fall to fire or collapse.  Those actually might be perfect to just go and build near the natives (lol, building a bunch of mausoleums in the native lands, perfect), but alternatively I guess you could just build a bunch near the city entrance (each gives access to 750 people, so you'd probably want 4-6 large ones ideally) and then have them live there without any labor access afterwards!  They even cost less per month than oracles/nympaeums, so maybe this is the way to go?

As for money, you essentially want to get to selling weapons to the natives as soon as you can (though before that you can use the normal trade routes), and then get to a "stable city" where you can just wait around and let cash accumulate so you'll have enough for everything else you'll need to do.  That also lets you solve unemployment easily by just putting down more mission posts (they don't require engineering posts) and you won't have to worry a ton about all of the wages you'll have to pay.

A Ceres Grand Temple is another possible option that might help out the city, but unfortunately grand temples do require labor access and I feel like there's just not a great place to put it.  But providing the farm cart pusher speed boost and reducing food consumption would probably make the population targets easier to hit, maybe worth the monthly fee?

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Warmer weather (and the associated influx of bugs) is just starting to hit...I'm not quite sure what to make of it.  I don't quite mind the changeup from winter, actually, though of course I'm really not excited for it either.  I...guess I'm not really too happy about it.

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I finished reading "Light From Uncommon Stars".  Overall I enjoyed it!  I wouldn't say it was something that made a deep impact on me or anything like that, like Tale for the Time Being made more of an impression on me, for instance.  But I liked reading it, it was an interesting blend of sci-fi elements with a more familiar type of story.  The sci-fi parts helped take a bit of the edge off of the other stuff, which I appreciated.

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I finished playing through Mother 3 as well.  You can tell this was overall a better and more expansive / well thought-out game than Earthbound (Mother 2), there's just..."more" and "better" of everything.  I admit that I sort of skimmed through the game rather quickly, fast-forwarding quite frequently, so I'm sure I didn't get quite the same experience as you would playing through it vanilla (particularly the enjoyment of the soundtrack), but I enjoyed it nonetheless, and it was quite interesting to see certain things that it did, such as how the final bits were handled and stuff like that.  You can really see the influence carry on to Undertale/etc. and how some of those ideas were expanded upon and given a different spin.

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Somehow I've nearly made it to the end of April...somehow.  I guess next month is May.