For years, I've played the version straight off the CD without any patches. I used to always accept every city I conquered, whether I wanted it or not, to avoid the loss of fame from razing it. If I really didn't want a city, I'd have the city build settlers down to pop 1, then build one more settler and the city would disband. Disband those settlers as they are built and boom, I can place cities more to my liking in the newly opened area.

In my most recent game, using the GOG 1.3 version without insecticide, I tried to do this. My 1 pop nomad city rushed a settler, but it didn't disband (just stayed at 1 pop and I got a new settler unit). Multiple attempts over the course of several turns gave the same result, that you can't disband a city by building settlers in this patch. So currently I've left a bunch of neutral cities, ruins, and nodes unconquered and I'm waiting for wandering neutral units to take over these undefended undesirables. Is there a better way for me to disband these cities that I no longer want?

Not that I know of, but I've also never known it to be impossible to disband cities by settler building unless the population is increasing so fast it creates a new citizen in the same turn it creates a settler. It could be the version you're using.

Here's my tip for razing unwanted cities without incurring a fame hit: learn the chaos spell Mana Vortex. MV creates a magical tornado that destroys population and buildings if you unleash it inside the walls of a city. Even better, unleash four or five of them at once, then sit back and let them wreak havoc for a few turns. Retreat when you get sick of it (but who would ever get sick of Mana Vortex?), and you'll get a list of how many people you killed and which buildings you destroyed. If it wasn't enough, come back the next turn and repeat as needed. Using this method you can reduce a huge city down to a village in a short period of time, and razing it will only incur a small fame penalty instead of the big hit for razing a huge city.

In the world of MoM, some ways of slaughtering your enemies are more socially acceptable than others.

I rushed a settler each turn for 2-3 turns to check whether the town is just growing that fast (though the pop growth was < 100 new people per turn). I got 2-3 settlers and a city that won't disband, which made me sad.

I'll have to remember that trick about the Magic Vortex. Since I only have 1 chaos book, and all 13 book slots filled, I can't get the spell this game. However, I can lead off the enemy units and then proceed to run rampant across the town squares to try and wreck the place. Assuming they don't have city walls, of course...

I think I figured out the problem. You can't remove a wizard's (former) capital by building settlers at size 1.

I THINK this works... but I only did it once and that was OH so long ago. I think you remove a city you control by removing buildings to decelerate the population growth and then have it produce settlers.once the population gets down to 1k, the next group of settlers basically are that last 1000 and the city basically falls into itself.. The city had a small population to start off, so it did not take a lot of settlers, so...