Let me start by saying that when the 0.96 playtest dropped, suddenly 18 of my Manors lost enough desirability to trigger this mechanic. The mechanic whereby villagers will abandon perfectly suitable homes due to “desirability” and assume a life of homelessness, eschewing all of their worldly possessions and food. This is laughable enough, however in my case this cascade of poor planning occurred one month before winter. No worries, right? I’ll build a nice park and they’ll all shut up and go home. Uhh nope. They won’t move in, even though the house is over 80% again. Turns out you have to salvage the house and rebuild every last one. Quite sadly, my wood surpluses were not sufficient to construct 18 new buildings, which at tier 1 would still not have housed all these rebellious, forethought-lacking souls, and as such they milled around the center of town uselessly during a particularly harsh snow storm, at which point they all died of exposure while their less vain, less impulsive neighbors sat inside their warm homes, offering no assistance. The absurdity.
The idea that a villager on the frontier, for whom life is quite difficult, would abandon their perfectly suitable home because they have to walk 100 steps to a park instead of 99 flies in the face of the realism that this game strives to attain. Doing so before right before winter is patently ridiculous. There must be another way to penalize a loss of desirability, be it unhappiness, unrest, refusal to work, loss of tax income, you name it.
Villagers abandoning their hard-fought-for homes is silly enough, but then, to have have to bulldoze the house and start over? Good Lord.
This is sorely in need of tweaking.