Help with City Placement (pics included)

[JavalTigar]

Go red on the dot, then purple. Build and take america. Then turn yellow in to a GP factory. Fill in the rest as you go but I wouldn't build too many more cities than the ones you have shown. Unless you are going for domination. Thats the nice thing about cIV, 10 +/- will do you just fine.

 

[Grunthex]

Red dot is your perfect first site. After that, depends on what's happened. Once your next settler is ready, you need to have a unit in position around/near blue dot -- if America hasn't taken the area, or have a settler heading there, beeline for it. Do NOT move it 1 SW, as you pick up 2 useless desert squares.

If you lose blue, or after blue, I'd build yellow. That's a good productive city site, potentially a science city later on. Contrary to much of the advice given, I'd merge pink and orange dots into 1 city, 1e of the current pink dot. You'll get the incenses eventually through border expansions, not much reason to put a crappy desert city up.

Before pink/orange, I'd put up purple dot though. And green dot 1w, and wait until you're at or close to Optics to found it, it's a money-waster before then.

All this comes from the perspective of someone who HATES squeezing cities in until you have code of laws, and currency, or they cost you money. Really, they're not profitable until Banking. (you might break even on a crap city if you're lucky).

If you do get red/blue, have military. Unless Washington has a lot of room to his east, he'll get antsy.

 

[Vizzini]

red dot, best by far, no matter what you're trying for really.

Agreed. You must expand towards your opponents to grab as much turf as possible - the Horses seal the deal.

 

[EridanMan]

I would agree red is the way to go, but I would take a slightly different line and drop my second city one west (on the Desert) for a couple reasons-
A- Desert tiles are absolute garbage, but city base production values ignore the underlying terrain... so your using that square to its highest potential
B- Pack your cities tighter- yes there is an overlap, but on the flip side, there is no wasted squares- your current setup calls for a whole bunch of unused land, which is far more of a problem then a little overlap (especially now that you can easily tailor each cities use of the overlapped land)
C- You don't burn a forest by starting on it

Yes, that gives a bit more distance to the Americans - but you can take care of them pretty easily anyways- feed your culture engine, and try to rush them early on and capture their land.

Just my .02, figured I'd give you a different perspective

 

[thejuicygoober]

MAN! You guys all had a bunch of good ideas and brought up a bunch of points I had never thought of. I thought that after you all contributed your ideas, you guys deserved to know what I finally decided to do.


I ORIGINALLY I HAD:

WHAT I DECIDED TO DO:

RED (2nd city)
I decided to move it one square north. I moved it north to use my tiles more efficiently by using the tiles that weren't being used and giving the purple better tiles. (It also allows me to immediately get the horse resource.)
I also agree with everyone who said to move the city on the desert square (one tile west of the original red dot) that I would get better tiles, make use of the desert square, and not burn a forest but I felt that would give the AI just enough room to build a city in-between the red city and the American capital so it would not be worth it. (Not to mention I would have to wait quite a while to get the horses resource)

BLUE (3rd city)
Kept as is.

PURPLE (4th city)
I moved it one tile northwest to get significantly better tiles. (I'm able to do that because I moved red north one tile)

YELLOW (5th city)
Kept as is.

PINK (6th city)
Moved one tile east so closer to the incense.

CITIES I THREW AWAY
First off I did not know you get resources within your culture, which was the reason I had the orange and light green dot.
Orange City- Man that city was crap. It would have had no production whatsoever. From culture, I can pick up the incense pretty soon and the second one (which is less important) later. The extra salmon (pink already has one) is good but I'll let my culture pick that up much later down the road)
Light Green City- Eh...I didn't think the city was worth it for its maintenance. I already have deer from the purple city and will let my culture grab the extra one. The whale within distance from light green is kind of alluring but seeing how much I work I would have to do to get it, I felt my efforts would have been used better on something else.

CONCLUSION
I am very happy with my city placement but don't really know at all how to specialize each of my cities.
I have posted about that on this thread, http://forums.civfanatics.com/showthread.php?t=139794 . I thought all of your advice was amazing here and hope you post on that thread too!
Thanks again!