Expanding your settlement will, unfortunately, reset all of the farmers that were already inside of it to begin with (or builders or miners) and it will take some time to get them trained again. If you can’t use the time lapse trick to get them trained right away, or don’t want to, then minize the impact by waiting until all of the mines or farms are ready to harvest from. Harvest, then use the finger of God to destroy them. Now you can start expanding again.
Alternatively, use the leashing to have farmers and miners build a little bit further away from your settlement, using the immediate spaces as expansion room to put abodes on plots instead. Start building abodes on all available plots, then use the settlement option again to pull the new adobes in with the rest of the settlement. They will, as previously mentioned, either sit directly next to it or sit directly on top of it.
Make sure that you are sure of it when you choose a location for a settlement. You can’t merge different settlement types together (example: builder settlement and farmer settlement), so the only way to change settlement types is to use the finger of God or the meteor shower to destroy the current one, which will cause huge losses in followers, and most likely in happiness as well.
Increasing happiness is fairly easy. God gifts are the most obvious way to increase your followers’ happiness, but they are so expensive that other ways are preferable. One way to increase it is to attain victories – cards gained, stickers gained, voyages finished and won, beacons powered back up etc etc.
Other ways to do so include beautifying your town, growing it larger, and adding trees. Your goal is to keep your followers’ happiness higher than the Astari tribe’s happiness. Their tribe throws festivals every so often, and whenever they do, their happiness will skyrocket. Keep your happiness up to ensure that your own followers don’t become theirs. In fact, if your happiness is significantly higher than theirs, some Astari might convert over and join you.
Gems are the premium currency of this game. The way (or at least one of the ways) to get more gems is simply to look around for boxes that appear around the landscape. Wooden boxes tend to contain gems while golden boxes contain stickers. This is the only known way to get free gems so far – other than that, purchasing is the option.