Your issue is most likely this one: Dfx deploy locally with a new Dfx identity - #24 by Severin
I’d personally put a soft limit at 200B cycles. Canister creation itself costs 100B cycles, so if you deploy with 100B the canister will have 0 left over and your deployment fails in a very newbie-unfriendly way. If the canister is already created, then the --with-cycles flag has no effects