Always go for highest materials for the first city. Sure you will have to get garden if the food tile is 1, but still going for tile with material of 5 or 6 is the best way : you get much faster troops being trained, and improvement being built quite fast.

Even better if that tile is next to or on the forest.

I'm afraid there's no guide. It's all personal preference. The posters above already prove as much: I would go for the 2/3/4 in this case, and make it a Conclave. It will soon produce 12 mana, without any shards. But I always use Mage Sovs. I suppose Primal and KVM don't. 

KVM is right about materials being more important than Grain. However, for your first city, low Grain does hurt, as your Capital needs to produce many Pioneers. That's why a 3/3/3 Conclave might be okay as well. Do you play a Kingdom or Empire? Kingdoms (Life magic) have the Sovereign's Call city enchantment, speeding growth. So Kingdoms should take 2/3/4, while Empires might decide on 3/3/3.

To be honest, I don't see why you'd want to make it a Fortress. You won't have much time to produce troops in the early game, since you need to build improvements and train as many Pioneers as you can.

Edit: Azunai blitz-posted before me . Well, ok, maybe +5 init and damage on troops is enough to win most games. I never tried...

I agree with Raiddinn, the flexibility makes it worth it, especially early game if you have the right spells.

I also try to make my highest essence city my fortress for the same reasons listed.

Rabe, do you have manual building placement turned on?

"Snaking" your cities, manually placing buildings to take maximum advantage of the environment/rules, is a huge benefit.

When you extend your cities into a long straight line, it can shave a lot of turns of travel time off in the course of the average game.

Also, being able to put the iron/shards/horses/etc inside your city walls is a very good advantage.  The only way to do this without manual is just to pray they are close enough to where you build the city.  If you can extend your city far in any direction from it's original space you can make it so your city defenders are also your shard defenders, iron defenders, etc.  It makes it so the enemy can't just go stepping on everything and setting your resource production way back.

Also, when you have a really long city it fertilizes nearby areas, allowing you to make additional cities nearby to the long ones.  Often those have good essence too.  It allows you to build more cities in a smaller area which makes your empire more defensible.

It also makes enemies have to take really long detours to get around your cities to something on the other side.  Snaked cities can potentially block passes and make enemies take 20+ turn detours if they can't conquer your blocking city.

Other than that, I mostly just try to build buildings in cities according to what they are good at.  Research is prioritized first in Conclaves and about last in Fortresses and Towns.  Extra food for the empire buildings I make ASAP with Towns.  Troop strength buildings get made first in Fortresses.  All cities need the production bonus buildings and unrest buildings.

I try to build the extra resource buildings ASAP, like iron mines, crystal mines, and horses.  The sooner they start pumping out their resources the sooner I can bring more powerful units online.

Really, though, once you get the snaking stuff down, defending your empire becomes much easier.

If you play with Quendar, make an extra fortress and just have it make infinite slaves.  Put 9 of them in each city as extra defenders.  They don't cost wages so there is no reason not to.  Make the troop strength buildings there so they are pretty strong.  You will probably want to build non-slaves in the main Fortress most of the time for your important armies so 2nd Fortresses are usually where you will get your infinite free unit production turns.

If you are a beastlord, then Tame everything you see and put them in cities as defenders.  They cost 40 mana each, but that is much easier to come across than turns to train units is.  They also don't cost wages so there isn't any reason not to kidnap as many as you can.  The more (free) city defenders you add to your cities the difficulty for the AI to take them increases dramatically.

If you are human, you can make a lot of henchmen units and make them into commanders and put them in your cities.  If you select gold generation abilities, they will pay for themselves.  Extra unrest reduction is also really good.  They are really hard to permanently kill too which is an added bonus.

For all that has been said about how FE is an offensive game, you can do pretty well by playing defensively in the early and mid games.

Food, with all of workarounds, is the least concern. You can always increase food regardless of grain the tile has. But you CAN'T increase production as easy as you can on food (read: very limited)

For the first city, material is king. Always go for the tile with highest materials unless you have 3+ essence tile, and even it is debatable against 5+ material tiles unless essence is 4 (then it will be both your capital and improvements-stacked fortress for making best troops later in game)

However, unless you are confident you can use your first pioneer very wise, avoid 1 grain tile, since it will only allow you to make one pioneer unit and then food-locked until garden is unlocked. The max population of 1 grain city is 20, and pioneer needs 30. When your sov first found a capital, it gives a fixed population of 30 (thus food says -10, but it won't decrease people). 

Yes, but if you look at the question, in all his three tiles there is the same production rate - 3 materials. Question of choice is between Grain and Essense, but not production.

Also remember that you can pick up Hydromancy as early as level 4 on your sovereign or a champion, if you go up the Mage path and don't mind taking 1 rank in Prodigy. On a 4-essence tile, that's a 100% bonus to food, or a 125% bonus to food on a 5-essence tile. This means that the 2/3/4 tile is more like a 4/3/3 tile if you're concerned about the food, which is clearly superior to the other options (which are more like 6/3/1 or 5.25/3/2 tiles, if you use the same enchantment on them, without accounting for the Scrying Pool). Also, it really doesn't take that long to get the sovereign to level 4 unless you're really unlucky with monster spawns in your area.

This is not true. The population requirements are (starting level - population breakpoint - resulting level):

lvl1 - 50 - lvl2
lvl2 - 150 - lvl3
lvl3 - 300 - lvl4
lvl4 - 600 - lvl5

With a base 25 food per grain, any city with two or more grain on the tile can achieve level 2 without food bonuses, and tiles with 6 or more grain can achieve level 3 without food bonuses. You can get food bonuses from the Garden line of buildings (+15/35/50/60 food per grain, with the 60 food per grain bonus being Empire-only), the Well line of improvements (+25%/50%/50%/50% local food production, Town only), the Grocer line of buildings (+5/10/20/40 faction food per grain, with the +40 food per grain bonus coming from a 1-per-faction building, Town only), the Pier line of buildings (+5/5/10/15 food per grain, with the +15 food per grain coming from a Kingdom-only structure, requires a river), and the Great Mill wonder (+25% food production locally, one per game). You can also get +1 grain through the Nature's Bounty spell from one of the magic techs, or +25% food per essence through the Gentle Rain spell from the Hydromancy trait. As a result, you require a food per grain bonus of at least 120 in order to grow a 5-grain tile into a level 5 settlement, which cannot be done without enchantments or Towns (at best, a non-Town unenchanted city that doesn't have the Great Mill from a faction without a global food bonus can have +95 food per grain [Empire] or +90 food per grain [Kingdom] - 25 base + 10/15 for the upgraded Pier + 60/50 for the upgraded Garden [Empire/Kingdom]). Note that I have given the total bonus for each structure rather than the bonus per upgrade.

Food per grain requirements to get a city to level 2/3/4/5 (Total Grain Yield. Total Food Bonus):

1. 50/150/300/600
2. 25/75/150/300
3. 17/50/100/200
4. 13/38/75/150
5. 10/30/60/120
6. 9/25/50/100
7. 8/22/43/86

It is certainly harder to get cities built on tiles with lower grain yields all the way up to level 5, but it's far from impossible unless you don't build any Towns; a 4-essence tile which you can upgrade to a 5-essence tile should not have any real trouble meeting these requirements, though it may take longer than the 3-, 4-, 5-, or 6-grain tile to do so. Just going with a Kingdom city without access to Pier-line structures, you can get a food bonus of 150 off of 4 essence (fully upgraded Garden + Gentle Rain), which is enough to get you to level 4 with 2 grain; you can then up the grain yield with Nature's Bounty or, if you're lucky, nearby Wild Grain resources, or build a couple of Grocer line buildings in your Towns. Since the Grocer-line buildings stack with one another, you can get these kinds of numbers simply by having a reasonable number of upgraded Grocers in your empire (specifically, having 11 or more fully-upgraded Grocers will allow you to get any city with 2 or more grain to level 5 if the Garden is fully upgraded and no other food bonuses are present; this requirement goes down to 6 for 3 or more grain, and if we allow for enchantments this number can become much lower, though how much lower is dependent on the site essence yield).

Additionally, while it is somewhat of an exploit, you do not lose the bonus gained from attaining level 5 if you stop meeting the population requirements for that city level. Thus, you can stack as many of the food-boosting enchantments as you can fit (or have) onto a city to get it up to level 5 if you desire to do so, and then remove them once you've attained your goal (note that any population over the food limit will disappear from the game on the next turn if you don't do something with it). Additionally, while I wouldn't say that Consulates in Outposts are exactly great ways to boost city growth, they can help if you want to push the growth up a bit. Just be aware that blowing 30 population and several turns of production or a few hundred gold to get +1 population growth isn't always going to make the city reach the next level any faster.

The pioneer doesn't have to be built in the city you're building the Outpost+Consulate for...if you've got gold to spare (for rushing the outpost + consulate) and a pioneer from another source, it's just a straight net +1 to growth (or more, if you've got +growth multipliers) at the cost of 2 turns not spent building "growth" (or 1 turn, if it's late-ish game and you can build an outpost in 1 turn without improvements.)

Oops, yes, it is. Current (1.4) population barriers are 50/120/250/600. Sorry about that, I'd forgotten that they changed it.

That makes the current food per grain requirements into:

1. 50/120/250/600
2. 25/60/125/300
3. 17/40/84/200
4. 13/30/63/150
5. 10/24/50/120
6. 9/20/42/100
7. 8/18/36/86

The above uses the same format as my previous post.

True, but rushing production is expensive (not that there's really anything better to do with the gold, but still ...), and since the topic is about the choice of first city, you don't really have the option of producing a Pioneer somewhere else until later in the game. Plus, generally I want to train Pioneers in more well-developed cities so that my less well developed cities can build up their infrastructure and grow, which runs counter to using Pioneers trained elsewhere to boost my first city's growth. Additionally, if for some reason I don't have the gold to rush out the Consulate, well, building a Consulate tends to be a relatively time-consuming process, especially for a newer city, and not one that I can easily offload to another city, unlike Pioneer training.

There's also the question of whether or not it's better to use the Pioneer to build an outpost or a city, but that's something better decided at time of use than beforehand.

Tiles with 4 essence are a bit of a gamble, but being so rare I always settle them in my games because it gives a unique experience and really boosts my mana production in the beginning (my sov is always a mage).  But like others said, those tiles have very little food, so your expansion is pretty stunted in the beginning if you're an empire.  When you manage to settle two more decent tiled cities and specialize them into a conclave and town, and get lucky with other magic schools from champions, that city on the 4 essence tile can become an awesome arcane fortress.  It can go horribly wrong however.  The last time I put my capital on a 4 essence tile, my first two champions didn't have any new magic spells, a swamp limited my expansion in one direction and the only tile I could settle nearby was a 1/4/0.  Hopelessly behind in research and power rankings, I got dogpiled right after meeting the first two of the opposing factions, and my three "Heart of Fire" units couldn't do anything to stop the onslaught.

Yeah, I'm aware of that and use it whenever I'm beleaguered by swamps.  My custom sov specializes in death and fire magic though and I got really unlucky in that game with neither of the first two pairs of champions having any magic proficiencies whatsoever let alone the coveted earth magic (I love getting that extra production from "Magic Hammers" in early cities and the third tier "Set in Stone" is also awesome right after you settle a city to crank out all the unrest reducing and production boosting stuff).

I'm addicted to fireballs.  I just can't help it.  And if I can infect everyone with "Graveseal" first, it's better than mainlining heroin.