There exists a somewhat troublesome issue when immigrants are granted into your village whilst not having enough housing. Established and employed residents often get kicked from their homes. People get moved around between shelters often. There is this notion in the game that once you achieve enough desirability, you can upgrade a house. Yet when that desirability drops, the house would be abandoned. Why would this be the case if there are residents who already live in lower desirability housing who would love to move into a better house even if the desirability isn’t much better than their existing shelter? If the concept is that people get used to living in a better home, then we need some form of stability in residence assignments. They can’t be pushed around into new slots every so often.
People need to be given class assignments, such that when their home is upgraded, the residents are upgraded in class assignment. They can now only live in a home that meets their class assignment. Ideally, once assigned to a home, a resident would not be moved around to other homes. Many professions, like the hunters and foragers, live out of their work spaces and yet have home assignments taken up as well. One can argue that certain jobs may require residents who meet a minimum status level to work there. That would make the people management much more interesting.
The treatment of new immigrants should be handled as follows. First, in addition to the standard laborer and builder pool, there needs to be an immigrant pool. You can not change the size of this pool. All new immigrants would be placed here if there were no spaces in the shelters for them to move in to. Now when there are any shelters planned for construction, and that construction is enabled, these immigrants can only aid in building these structures, up until the maximum builder limit is reached on them. They would supperscede any other village builders. When the maximum builder limit is met and there are no other shelters assigned for construction, the remaining immigrant pool resorts to harvesting wood when there are any trees assigned for harvesting. They may also be assigned for clearing trees and rocks from a designated shelter building sight. Lastly, if there are no trees assigned for harvesting and yet still no shelters set up for construction, they will go to work harvesting random trees in order of distance to the town hall. If there are shelter construction sites and not enough materials, or the builder limit is reached, they will select trees closest to these sights to cut down and deliver materials to the building sites if needed.
The point is, these immigrants should be desperate for housing, and focused entirely on that need before allowing you to put them to work anywhere else. They will still take from your food stocks or pick from orchardist trees when they need food and maybe even harvest from wild berry bushes when they are available, but they’re focus is on their own survival, and not being exploited until they die. Having permanent residence, where each individual receives their housing assignment one time and they do not move is part of this gig because then they cannot be kicked out when immigrants come to town. If a home is destroyed, they are still assigned to that home but should default to immigrant behavior, refusing to work and focused on rebuilding their own home.
This is just a grand idea I came up with recently that I hope gains some traction with player interest. I mentioned in a bug report on the Cavalry Stables that maybe they should have a desirability penalty like the stables do but that a special residence type be made that is exempt to any manure based desirability penalties where workers in these professions would have to be housed because they would be immune to these desirability hits. This would include compost yard workers, herders, and cavalry troops. These homes would forever be non-upgradable and generate the same tax revenue as a basic shelter when near a market.
Related article: Cavalry Stable has meaningless area of affect circle