Swallowed-up colonies

[Jimjam Jones]

Okay, here's the deal:
I was playing as the English one time, and having reached some jungle, I noticed some silks lying around that nobody had discovered (or so I thought).
I had some workers handy nearby, so I sent them along to build colonies and connect the silks to my trade network, and I then sent along a knight to guard the area.
Everything was going fine and dandy when suddenly a German settler and a unit escorting it popped up and founded a city right next to my knight, swallowing up two of the three colonies I had just built This had made me mad enough but then Bismarck made an appearance and gruffly demanded that I remove my knight.
Seeing as I was seriously ticked off at this point I flatly refused and it all blew up into a full scale war. I eventually seized the German city and generally whooped the krauts, but later on in the game I found the same trouble occuring with French cities popping up and grabbing the colonies I had positioned in neutral territory. Has this happened to anyone else? Are there any possible remedies?

 

[NY Hoya]

happens quite often. That's why i only use colonies as placeholders for future cities. the only thing i can think of to prevent the AI planting a city next to the colony is to use three units to block the AI settler movement before it gets in position to build a city and then rush one of your own settlers out to the position ASAP

 

[sealman]

build cities not colonies. I only build colonies in one of the following situations:

1) when I was to claim a resource in the desert (I have changed the terrain feature for desert to make it unfeasable to build cities

2) when I want a strategic resourse and do not want to wait for my boarders to expand.