Does anyone know if the next release address the issue of immigrant wave size?
Main problem is I'm super picky about dwarves and labors, so I feel compelled to carefully examine and assign/reassign each migrant to the jobs I feel they ought to be doing. I don't want to have to kill immigrants or edit the raws every single season or otherwise directly influence the immigration issue... really, I want the more modest migration waves of 40d and 23a back. ...
There's a few ways to look at this. To break things up into slightly more specific categories, we might choose to distinguish between:
* Immigrant: Someone who chooses to come to a fort, and the fort chooses to accept. Either side may be a bit reluctant, but ultimately it is at least nominally an agreed-upon process. There may be different sub-qualifications; noble / commoner, rich / poor, skilled / un, warrior / tradesman, and so on. In an ideal world the player or the scenario could be a bit more specific about the sub-qualifications.
* Refugee: Someone who is forced to leave their previous situation, and ends up at the fort, without the fort expecting them. In small numbers, some forts may just treat these as the error bars on immigration; but in quantity or for forts that don't want more people it is a problem.
* Transportee: Someone who is forcibly relocated to a fort (think Australia), but who is nominally free once they get there, albeit possibly with a delay or with lowered social status. Depending on the relative situation of the fort and the Mountainhome, this may or may not be something the fort can influence or control. (not currently implemented in stock)
* Slave: Someone who is forcibly relocated to a fort, and is not free afterward. Note that by default dwarves don't do slavery. In some settings they may be able to purchase freedom (Roman-esque), in some settings they may not but their children are free (Moslem-esque), in others they may be a permanent unfree underclass (historic North American-esque). (not currently implemented in stock)
* Indenture: Similar to a transportee, but voluntary; someone who agrees to serve a fixed term after arrival, in exchange for transportation and getting set up once they get there. They will eventually become free citizens. (not currently implemented in stock)
* Visitor: While nominally visitors are temporary, some fraction of them may decide they like the fort and attempt to become immigrants. Once slightly more complex worlds come into play, visitors may also turn into refugees occasionally (such as when their home gets destroyed while they are visiting). (this has only recently been implemented in stock, and somewhat in flux)
* Mercenary: While more or less a visitor, there might eventually be long-term employees of a fort that are not members. Historic civs have in various times had an elite unit from some other civ, frequently used as a guard for the head of state, or to provide unique skills (for example, the Swiss Guards at the Vatican, the Varangian Guard of the Byzantine emperors, etc.). (not currently implemented per se in stock, but in a lot of ways the semi-implemented animal people fort inhabitants can end up along these lines) Sometimes they may have the option to become citizens upon retirement, etc.
* (nobility): Not sure what the right descriptor would be, but people sent by the mountainhome (etc.) whether the fort likes it or not. Currently that's more or less just nobles; historically that might be traditional nobles, satraps, governor-generals, tax collectors, religious leaders (archbishops) or enforcers (inquisition), and so on. They may come with considerable support staff; currently just royal consorts and guard, but consider the British Raj in India for an over-the-top historical example.
Once we get into the Starting Scenarios arc, various scenarios will presumably allow or require limits on various of the above.
The difficulty is that by default fortress migrants are treated by the game as approximately immigrants, whereas due to lack of sufficiently detailed controls some players think of them as closer to refugees. There are only limited ways you can "signal" the player's desires, both as a game and as a simulation, that are currently implemented. Population cap, trade, wealth, difficult location, dead worlds, etc. are crude signals designed for what is approximately the default scenario or for hacks around it, and some players prefer to play "scenarios" that are not yet implemented or supported. You can't specify that you want *some* more dwarves, but only if they are X; where which players want what X on which occasions varies widely. (Unmarried, military skills, tradesfolk I don't yet have, worshipers of a particular deity, NOT worshipers of some other deity, only red beards, only people with cheese-industry-related-skills plus anyone who is willing to carry stone blocks for our giant statue of cheese megaproject, or whatever.)
From a simulation standpoint, if you have a prosperous and healthy fort in an accessible location, it would be difficult to explain why you wouldn't get dwarves (and possibly others) showing up to better their own situation. Artificial limits such as pop cap, while sometimes necessary for performance reasons, feel "gamey"; but we'd need far more complex stock mechanics to represent more historical approaches. Hopefully the scenario arc will offer some options. For instance, if the scenario was a religious / monastic one, you might have very few default migrants, but a lot of visitors, some of which would petition to "join the order" (become citizens of the fort); this sort of thing would require comparatively few additional mechanics. Given the popularity of the play style, "starting dwarves and their descendants" will likely be worked in somehow without the trouble of generating a dead world.