I do so love drawing dots. Here's your map of the world zoomed out but prior to founding cities, and here's where I would have put my first 10 cities (assuming I could grab all the sites, and from how yours turned out I probably would). Comments and founding order below the pic.
Red Dot: Where your Ur ended up being. I drew this map as though I had no foreknowledge of where iron would be, and claiming a bunch of potential iron sites and silks from Zulu clutches is a good start.
Yellow Dot: Founded right on top of the silks. That's just the best spot for the city, it looks like it's on the river, is on the coast, and neither overlaps Babylon nor wastes tiles near Babylon.
Normal Blue Dot: Lot of fudge factor up here, there' s no compelling features that would suggest a good city site except for a lot of bonus grassland, the normal blue dot is a coastal city that includes some of the mountains, a lot of coast squares, and three bonus grasslands. With time this could be a real powerhouse city, though it will start off weak without an aqueduct.
Gray dot: Four bonus grasslands, furs and a plains wheat, first ring to capital. Has potential to be a very strong city at all stages of the game, though it will be stuck at size 6 until an aqueduct. High priority site, definitely.
Orange dot: A slow starter, not much going for it besides the three bonus grasslands. Fills the space, but not a high priority.
Light Green Dot: This is probably where I would put my Forbidden Palace. On a river, lots of cows, surrounded by good terrain. This might be close for a FP if this is a large map, but it's better to have a relatively close site done sooner than agonizing over getting the perfect site and delaying it by 20-30 turns.
Light Blue Dot: That river is in an awkward position, you can't put a city on it without preventing placing more coastal cities, and this layout is already a little light on coastal cities. So I put this city as far from the river as I could so I could place another half-city site on it later to fill the space
Pink dot: Another fixer-upper site.
Lavendar Dot. Depending on where iron turned out being and what the Zulus did for their settlements, this could either be a high-priority site or a low one. It uses that whale tile, grabs more of those mountains, only overlaps the red dot on mountain tiles (which won't be highly contested until your cities start getting to be size 16-20). While it is kind of wedged in on the coast, it has enough grassland tiles to supply enough food to eventually work just about every tile in its radius.
Dark purple dots: Tentative city sites after all the other sites are founded.
This is a map for having as few wasted tiles around the capital as possible with as little overlap as possible. A slightly denser build might bring some more benefit to start off, though. Move the orange dot one tile to the NE, then the light green one square due east, and that would create a stronger green dot site and open up enough tiles there to get another city founded northwest of the light blue dot.
I'd found them in this order: Red, Gray, Blue, Yellow, Lavender, Orange, Green, Pink, Light Blue.
As for how you actually laid out your cities...your cities in general are too far apart to use the land well, especially there are too many wasted tiles around the capital. Akkad and Eridu need to be closer. Ashur should be on the coast, placing it one tile away from the sea means it can never build a harbor and those tiles will only ever produce 1 food for it, plus you'll have one fewer city able to produce naval units. Given where iron turned out to be on your map, Nineveh is probably a better choice than my blue dot for that site to get it online quicker, but Uruk is too far away, I'd probably still put it where the lavender dot was on my map and live with the extra overlap. As far as wasted tiles go, Ellipi is an okay site, but placing it right in the middle of so many forest tiles was probably not the wisest move unless you had enough workers to clear it out quickly. With Akkad and Eridu closer, all the other cities you founded probably would have been moved in as well, with another ring of cities beyond them.
You also need to change your worker orders, you have bonus grassland tiles irrigated at Nineveh but normal grassland tiles unimproved, the plains wheat does not look like it has been irrigated, and you are under a dire shortage of workers in general. This is a map that calls for more workers than usual due to the heavy amount of jungle, mountains, and forests around your starting location. I'd have either Babylon or Ashur (or maybe even both on a map with such poor terrain) build granaries and set them to push out workers every couple of turns pretty much until the end of time.
). You post save game files/screenies, describe situation and hopefully get replies by viewers, then draw your consequences about pros/cons and play next couple of turns.
