I've finally had a bit of time to play again. Thanks for the very timely 1.32c update!
Minor spelling bug - Epigoni has the Mamertines appearing as the "Marmertines". Tag MAR seems OK since the word is derived from "Mars".
Observations so far: Rome isn't moving north very fast, so far just to Apuani, home of the briefly resurrected Etruscans (the faction was annexed while the colonist was in transit, so they popped right back up a month or so later...). On the other hand they're showing no sign of wanting to fight Carthage either, just taking the Sicilian provinces held by minors. It's a bit heavy-handed, but maybe it would help to give Rome and Carthage cores on each others capitals?
Pontus may be a bit weak without the new coastal provinces. In my game they only managed to take one before being eaten by the Seleucids. They wasted a lot of time on inconclusive wars against Lesser Armenia early on. Maybe they got missions based on the vanilla Pontus setup, rather than missions to go after the new coastal minors first? Not sure how much attention the AI pays to that kind of thing, and I didn't watch closely enough to see who got what missions.
The idea tanathos suggested about events to make trouble for wrong culture, wrong religion regions sounds good to me. Not sure how to do it, though. Maybe have events hitting the loyalty of governors of such provinces? There'd have to be a colony exemption, though, since a couple of population attempting to civilize a frontier province aren't going to give a governor delusions of independence just because the assimilation event hasn't hit yet.
My experiments with tweaking the climate system have been mostly successful. This current game is one of the few where I'm not involved in the eastern Med action so I may be reading too much into the Seleucid successes, but there could be game balance reasons to keep the Fertile Crescent at modern-day infertile (Arid/Semi-Arid) modifiers. That would leave Milan, Helvetii, Vindelicia, North Scotland, and Armenia as the changes from the current version. Adding a "poor" modifier has worked well to make the useless desert provinces (Arabia, western Egypt, inland Libya) properly worthless compared to other Arid provinces, as well as distinguishing the Picts from the Volcae. I'm not sure adding a "rich" modifier is a good idea, though, since many of the obvious places to put such tags are in heavily contested regions that could upset game balance. If the Ptolemies could actually achieve historical results I'd be happier giving Antioch/Damascus/Phoenicia/Jerusalem a "rich" modifier. I'll probably start my next game without it, unless by then Hardradi has done his own overhaul of province modifiers that renders my testing irrelevant. Hardradi, if you want to take what I have as a starting point let me know and I'll post my edited files somewhere or email them to you.
Trin Tragula, I'd be interested to see your suggestions for modifiers focusing on growth rate (which I agree are usually too high in Paradox games) rather than tax modifier. I don't find +10% or +20% tax modifiers too high, personally, and part of my thinking in experimenting with a "rich" modifier was to make certain provinces more important and worth fighting over. The Seleucids and Ptolemies fought six wars over that rich cluster in Syria and Judea that I worried about in the previous paragraph, after all.
