I think you have to have expanding in your game plan from the start... due to the monster ai now there isn't any point founding a new city unless you have some way to defend it. The best thing that can happen is if you find a sand golem early. You can use that to protect your first city while you lay down another. Also for the first time ever I find myself buying the advisor a spaer to help get through the early turns.

As soon as I find a suitable location (at least One resource of Any type, at this point... I keep getting resource poor maps!).  So of late, it is oftentimes that the nearest, and sometimes Only, suitable location is a neighbors capital.  So depending on the skill sets and gear of my Soveriegn and theirs... this may occur early or take a while. 

If I can find the resources, I generally want to establish a second city ASAP.  One reason is that I want to get the +10% gildar modifier from a carvan route, in my capital sooner rather than later.  I find this tiny fraction of gildar to be helpful in the early game.  I also like having a second garrison of a nearby cities defendars as soon as I can.  Those are the top two reasons I want to establish a second city as soon as feasible.  Sometimes monsters slow this down... and that is ok ;~) 

I am expanding as we speak. The particles in my body are moving further and further away from each other at an undetectable rate that is in-line with the rest of the universe. For better or worse though, I'll be long dead before it affects me in any noticeable way. Which is a shame, because it might have caused the elongation of certain appendages.

I play piano, so having longer fingers would be an advantage.

Settle in starting point or close to it, depending of the fertile land tile and the shard positions (so I can get easy access to the fertile land and make my city grow toward the shard).

Second city only becomes a priority once:

-First city is safe and growing fine.

-Another food tile is found and first city is safe

(-A non food resource [mine or horses, I don't care about everything else at this point] is "near" me and there is an AI around too)

Sometimes my second city is obtained from my enemies as lately I start always near of at least one. ¬.¬ I get second city with more food, cripple (if not kill) an AI, and saved 10 materials of 1 Pioneer.

I rapidly expand in the early game, often stretching my limited materials as thin as possible to get as much land and outposts (More outposts means more free population, and more caravans.) out as fast as possible. I almost always grab Heal and Teleport as my first two spells, which makes rapid expansion exceptionally easy, as city defense can be handled by a single Imbued Caster with 3-4 Oak Spearmen.

If they ever took Heal and Teleport out of the early game mix, I'd probably still rapidly expand, making use of cheap high attack based throw-away units like self-designed Oak Spear users without armor.

I look at the game as zone coverage so I expand as my armies grow large enough to encompass an area with enough resources to warrant a town or better.

That said, I play only on my testing map, Prirod. This map is the largest map possible without altering the map files and has every resouce painstakingly positioned to garantee both strategic significance for every area and enough handicaps for the computer to present a very real threat. It takes some time to fix the map after ecery update, but makes me not have to worry about randomness getting in the way of other testing aspects.

The new raiding armies are smart and numerous, presenting a challenge to my usual steamrolling of towns. I find I can only get about three before I really need to tech up my military to be able to cover more ground. The best for zone coverage is parties of mounted leather armored war staves with movement maxed. I like to set heroes as expander as they can do all other functions on the way to a new settlement.

Is everyone else still trusting that treacherous random map generator?