Well obviously, the only constant as far as placements are concerned is that you want the resources that nobody else has. It’s my general experience that newbies tend to focus too heavily on brick and wood because they believe that fast expansion is a must. If I had to choose between building a new settlement early and building a city early, I would choose the city. My reasoning is that if a number that your city is on get rolled heavily while everybody else has only settlements, your sheer advantage in terms of cards quickly becomes overwhelming, and you can either use ports or trade two-to-one to get whatever resource you don’t have. There are exceptions of course.