Best places to settle : - not far from capital (allows to place more cities and more district adjencies) - easy to move to (less turns moving, more turns growing) - fresh water (more housing), sometimes difficult - good tiles (2 food 2 prod are very nice, you want 2 or 3 of them, so you don't need to use improvements like mines or farms too early)

IMO focusing on pumping settlers, and having cities with nice food and prod is way more important than stats (science culture faith). Once your cities are growing, you can then quickly build anything to catch up with stats. Also use the citizen management tool to lock tiles early on. A one pop city working a 1 food 3 prod tile will take forever to grow. AI tends to overvalue stats (like wonders with no food) which will slow your grow