As far as city placement...avoid building ditrectly adjacent to resources, if your city or buildings touch a resource it will add that resource's build time into your build qeue instead of building the structure independantly. As far as i know it ALSO counts towards your city maximum tile limit if it gets absorbed into the city limits.
Thought that was changed to not affect tile limit a long time ago. I'm pretty sure it doesn't.
As far as early game advice, these guys tips are pretty good. The monsters AI has gotten much more aggressive, and judging by Frogboys new builds will be even a bit more tough. Mostly do to the fact that they group up together into large stack fairly early on.
My opening city starts basicaly as follows.
Scout a bit. Get goodies they will hopefully pay for early buildings.
I build my city one space away from a food plot in a direction where I think the influence will cover most of the resources I've found eventually.
Build a beacon of hope in the direction of the farm.
When its done your influence should have bubbled out to include the farm. Build the farm and start on a workshop.
Build a hut you can connect the farm to your town so monsters can't squish it.
Build a tech research building.
Research military tree.
Continue building huts, techs, and workshops. You can also design a staff man and pop out one/two of those if there are alot of monsters around. He will have +2 attack over the peasant and cost barely any more.
Your town will hit level 2 at some point. This unlocks oak spears. Get some for your heroes.
Design your military units to include a spear. If you still have a long wait and there's alot of monsters pop one of these out.
When research finishes Get the basic armor one. It should have leather armor and cloaks in the description of what it unlocks.
Design a unit with the the oak spear and armor. The cloak is kind of expensive early on you may want to leave it off at this point.
Get your heros equipped with the new armor as you have the money.
At this point you should be ok for a long time, unless you get very unlucky and get a bad monster spawn. For instance I had a skath? with 19atk/17def spawn and get rolled into a group of 2 darklings & 4 spiders my last game. It was early enough on that my heros had spears and some armor but I still only had staff men in the city. That's pretty much bad luck though. I rarely see such a powerful spawn so early. If he had come ten turns later it wouldn't have been a big deal. As I would have had a couple pike men.
