43? That's odd. In my worlds it always comes out "42".
I used to avoid placing cities with alot of water in their domain, thinking this just limited the city's population. Now I squeeze as much city domain onto the map as possible. All my cities have some overlap, but the nation gets more this way. A city on a point may be a risk early on, so I build these later. Also, I try to make my first cities good producers of settlers, so I'll skip some arid lands in the beginning. Does anyone know a trick for plotting-out where to place all the cities in an area? On some maps, they seem to just fall into place neatly, and I wonder if that's pure luck.