I think I have hit a point where I should really turn up the difficulty since dragons have become a slog. I just pelt them with fireballs and hit them with my enchanted axe to get my mana back until they die. And sometimes I even use a fraction of my mana to heal myself back to full.
And slightly on the current topic: Why not do both? Build a settlement around a landmark.
That's mods like Real Time Settler... those are a bit generic, sure you get to choose exactly where the buildings will be and rotate them and stuff. I'm talking about a real quest (presumably, you WOULD build the settlement around a landmark: a designer specified one) with immersion and ending up with a living place, not an in-game version of the Construction Set.
I don't think there's a way to create believable "buildable" settlements in TES games on arbitrary locations with point and click. AFAIK you can pre-make the settlements in the CS, set them to invisible/disabled/whatever, and have quest triggers gradually reveal them as they get "constructed".
And yeah, @neyvn, I seriously can't believe you can't see the difference in both proposals. Taking over ready-made places is nothing like building a settlement and inviting other NPCs to live in it.
EDIT: But in case you're wondering: modding the takeovers should be fairly easy, if you can just create a trigger-like object and edit all the spawns in every place so that they become inactive once you activate said object (or merely set the cells to "not refresh", this would even affect containers. Now, I don't know if you can even change the "refresh" flag in cells during runtime.