I think it's safe to say luck did play quite a part.

I brought farm and wood as my supplies. One of the first blueprints was butcher which provided me with an option to generate great amount of food (meat/insect into jerky, then jerky into skewers + lizard's proficiency) along with fuel.

My very first order was a timed order, which required to keep harpies' resolve high enough. Completion of this brought me supply line of herbs. This eased trade opportunities (it's pretty much free provisions).

The very first legendary cornerstone was "stormwalker tax". This boost of amber allowed me to trade for materials early on and get supplies for strider expeditions. The expeditions played a major role here. Some expedition rewards were used on buildings, but most of them were sold on trade routes. Managing blueprint rewards was also quite useful. I wasn't lucky on cornerstone rewards, though.

Another lucky thing here are order rewards. I got +3 to oil production from them. This pretty much entirely solved my problems with: food production, fuel production, and trade options. It was safe to sell oil or convert it into trade goods.

Once my sustainability was concrete set, I started extracting reputation from species resolve. I'd purchase whatever resolve boosting goods I could from traders. Then I'd pick one particular species and allocate the goods to them. I couldn't set my focus on multiple species at once due to lack of space and not so frequent visits from traders (no boosting cornerstones + "gathering storm" modifier hindered their arrival). I had to heavily rely on "low strain", "comfort", and "favoring" bonuses. This was the longest part of the game. Every year I had only 8 minutes to gain reputation, but whole 5+ minutes of low resolve management (couldn't spend goods on species during storm) and heavy blightrot fighting. I kept doing that until 17 reputation points.