Pesky Settlers

[marvinkosh]

Having friendly neighbours occupy the vacated land is not such a bad thing if it doesn't mess up your borders. For one thing, the more cities they have, the more trade you can potentially have with them.

If I truly don't want someone to settle a big patch of land, I put serious thought into plonking a city in the middle of it and plan to crank the borders outwards as quickly as possible. It will be a pain to add another city to my Civ, but I tend to think of the killing I could make later on with commerce.