Incredible game, but eish, good luck :P I hope you mean permadeath as in limited lives instead of the single life difficulty. The latter I think will just be an exercise in frustration for a first playthrough since of the top of my head there are at least 3 instances in the game where you can die very easily, one of which is very close to the end of the game, and another is a 'frequent' occurrence: that infernal crow monster and her 'babies' at nighttime(hint: molotov cocktails!)
Wow really, you and I are on the same mission :) I still have to continue with my playthrough. I think I'm about halfway, but I try to do every peaceful and dangerous mission.

By the way, gatehouses function the same way as roadblocks in Pharaoh: it blocks random walkers like prefects, but lets through destination walkers like market ladies going to the granary/warehouse.

Yes, I mean just one life. I thought It would give the game the certain tension needed for a horror game. I know, I'm not right in my head...

Perhaps not :) By the way I got that tense feeling with infinite lives, let alone one life. So the 5-life maximum on hard difficulty I think will be as much as my heart can take :P And that at least will be kinda doable for a first playthrough so perhaps consider considering using that instead :)
How far did you get if you don't mind me asking? 2nd safehouse?

Yeah! I'm looking at Poseidon next because I got them in a bundle. Pharaoh's been a favorite for a long time.

That's good to know. I'll take a look, usually I opted not to use gatehouses and walls often in Pharaoh because it seemed like a large expense. Walls always got to be a big pain in the posterior with city design. even in the military missions vs just figuring out where the enemies come from and building all the forts there, so it's a bad habit I guess. I tend to go for the peaceful missions because the battle system in the games isn't the best and takes a lot of support and infrastructure to get troops, and then you wind up getting creamed because like, the first attack is within a year or something.

Hellgate: Global

Hellgate London SP Revival

Grim Dawn

On a looter spree atm

Yeah, walls can be a pain to factor into city design. But for the gatehouses, which are available on most/all later peaceful missions, you can just place them by themselves to cage in walkers. Eg, here's an old screenshot where I tried it (ignore the drawing):
https://www.gog.com/upload/forum/2016/09/8574f6671e254ac258bb51c522ec263d13b136f4.jpg

I want to get to Zeus and Poseidon as well, but I've got this think in my head that I've just got to completely finish Caesar 3 and Pharaoh first! So perhaps in a couple of decades I can start with Poseidon :)

Yeah, I think it was the second safehous in the woods with the pig-sty and the village.

A couple of decades is right. Pharaoh takes forever in those pyramid missions.

Ahah neighborhood optimization. I'm going to save that. XD That looks awesome. I think I came up with similar optimizations for Pharaoh but their needs are a little different so it takes some tweaking to get the whole road covered without threat of devolving.

Where did you get that resolution mod? I've been playing it old style at 1024x768. I found one a while back for Pharaoh but haven't seen one for Caesar yet.

The 1920x1080 and 1680x1050 ones are here:http://www.wsgf.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=64&t=14149&p=144499
It's one of the mirror-links towards the bottom of the page. And I have working 1920x1080, 1600x900 and 1360x768
ones on my pc. How it works is you just put the exe in the same folder as the normal exe, run the new exe and then select the 1024x768 resolution option ingame to get the widescreen resolution.

If those don't work for you then let me know and I'll share mine on a temporary file-sharing site.

Avoid starting in the Terran sectors! If you want a quick start, pick the bankrupt assassin start and head to the sector west of you. Get some ship or loot, sell and improve your ship a bit and away you go.

I'm confused. What is X3 Terran Conflict, Reunion or War Pack?

The X3 War Pack is two games - X3: Terran Conflict and X3: Albion Conflict

and is Reunion an add on/sequel?

Reunion is the first X3 game :P

Order

X3: Reunion --> X3: Terran Conflict --> X3: Albion Prelude

Standalone, came out before those but uses the same engine, albeit different user interface.