That's another one down!  This one is Caesarea, which has the unique challenge where you can't grow or produce any food whatsoever and need to rely solely on food imports to feed your people.

I took two attempts for this one, mostly because the first time through my city was becoming a bit unwieldy in its layout and I wanted to try my hand at restructuring things a bit.  I think I managed a lot better the second time through, packing things into mostly efficient spots.  My favorite part was sticking the barracks and military academy on the verryyyy top where the crescent-shaped island is, next to the trade docks, meaning that every time a new soldier was trained they'd have to jog all the way across the entire desert to make it to their post, haha.

I'm definitely becoming a better and better player as I learn from my mistakes and the various "gotchas" that can take an otherwise booming city to a system that somehow just isn't working right.  This time I actually managed to finish the entire mission before I discovered my mistake -- I wasn't being efficient with my food imports!

I had set up the trade routes as efficiently as I could, I thought -- setting up the land traders with a nice highway to speed through the city, and building all of the appropriate monuments -- caravanserai, lighthouse, grand temple to ceres and mercury, but I still had some problems getting everyone fed toward the late part of the game, especially when I needed to divert a bunch of food supply to feed the 9 (!) luxury palaces that I made next to the hippodrome.

Turns out that my issue was not having enough warehouse storage space for the traders to dump all of their stuff off!  I've been trying to default to just having warehouses split across 4 goods, so they can only house 8 of each good.  It's more efficient in terms of warehouse usage and if you do things right you won't need to stockpile a ton of goods anyways because often you'll just always have carts from cart depots ready to unload more once those 8 are gone.  But I guess for goods where you really want the trade to be rock solid, especially for =imports=, you should probably allocate more space to them.  I also didn't think of it, but I could have just used granaries for the traders to drop off their haul, since they can do that (and granaries hold 3200 instead of 2400...maybe the cart depots even hold more?  I think from granary to granary they hold 16 units instead of 8, but I'm not sure if that applies to warehouse to granary transfers...probably not).

I had fun, though, definitely feels good to have built a great city in the end.

The next mission up has an interesting challenge where you don't have access to reservoir water (until later on, I guess?) so you have to just build using wells at first I guess?  I'm assuming you will unlock mission posts later on and then gain access to the one oasis surrounded by the native huts, so I'll have to try and plan out where my future reservoir and aqueduct lines might go after that happens...

In other news, I finally got my Pastel Dreams keycaps!  They look really cute for sure.  The DSA profile is kind of interesting, kind of a smaller key surface to find with your fingers, and definitely I feel like I prefer cherry profile since the sculpted profiles just feel nicer to navigate around finger-wise, but it's not too bad, all things considered.  I currently have them installed in my Neo80, along with the HMX Twilight switches, so more of a clacky build (although somehow the spacebar seems to be really thuddy in comparison).  I had a small issue where the backspace key wasn't returning well, maybe this particular keycap set just has the wrong tolerances for the stabilizers I'm using.  But I seem to have fenagled it around to where it works okay.  Maybe in the future I'll swap it out and the Pastel Dreams will go in the Cycle7 while the Osume Sakura goes on the Neo80?  I dunno, there's lots of possible options, I guess.

I'm supposed to try and make sure I get a little more sleep these coming weeks, so let's get to that...