ControlFreak
Not An Addict, Really
You asked for advice, your going to get it.Originally posted by AlanH
For anyone unfamiliar with settler farming, we are already at five food per turn in Makkah, and so when our granary is built in five turns we shall expand every two turns, and we are nearly at pop 4 now. Makkah won't stop at 6 because it's on a river. But until we improve some plains and/or the goats we won't produce the 30 shields we need for a settler every four turns to keep the population under 7. However, while we have insufficient shields we can produce workers to keep the population under control. They only need 4 or 5 shields per turn. Most of us can slip up on this sort micromanagement occasionally, so in an emergency we should switch citizens from flood plains to plains tiles to slow down food production and avoid pop 7, but this is not best use of Makkah's good food resources.
If you do indeed "slip up" and let your population grow above 7, go with the flow. A large captial is extremely productive. Take this opportunity to build some higher ticket items (barracks, temple, even swords) Then build settlers. With the high shields of a large city, settlers build faster than you can grow. Your population will slowly drop back down. The food in your granary is used to fill the granary when you drop below size 6 so no waste there. MM to low food just because you want to avoid growing past size 6 is wasteful. You've already blown the settler every four turns, why not take advantage of the power rather than put a limit on your potential.
As far as RCP, it is very powerful but I still only use it to decide between two equal positions that grab the same resources. Note that the RCP route is in a large way negated by the City Rank Bug: A city that is closer to the FP than the closest city to the capital is given a first city ranking. I myself received a free town way away on the East. I built my FP near my Palace and if I had enough RL time, I would have used my first leader to move the Palace to the far away town. That have made my entire empire Rank 1! It just depends on how much you want to abuse the system.