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Originally Posted by whswhs
The word "settled" means that the world's people didn't evolve on that world, but came there from somewhere else. It's like the way a lot of SF envisions human beings going out through the solar system or the galaxy and founding colonies. So you can talk about the "main settlement" and "secondary settlements." But if the intelligent race evolved on that world in the first place, that distinction doesn't apply.
In fact, if you want to keep things simple, you could figure the carrying capacity of each world for its native race and tech level, and assume that that's its population. In the long run the population will be in that range—unless they overpopulate, crash the ecosystems, and go to zero population!
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It's worth bearing in mind that you can have worlds sustainably above carrying capacity just having them be predominantly live in desperate poverty for their tech level.