Just had several boring days with no overseers and 18 colonists wandering about doing nowt after a fish man rampage when I only had one soldier. Might be good if at least one or two idle colonist get promoted to overseer as it's a bit dull waiting for prestige points to get a Artisan when you have just started a game. Actually the colonist were not quite doing nowt. They were quite often punching each other in the face.
For what it's worth, I have some tickets on my plate with regard to improving overseer immigration. I can't promise it'll fix this sort of thing on the first try, but it should make it.. less likely, at least, once it goes in.
Balance issues: Day2: a group of hostile soldiers walks right into my village-to-be. I got lucky: I conscripted an overseer and our lonely worker into a militia and the hostile soldiers turned out to have as good a morale as my soldiers normally have: After two shots were fired at their leader they all ran. Jeez, guys, what's with the chicken armies? In this instance I was lucky, because I would've been toast if those guys had been half way decent soldiers - but this seems to be a pervasive issue. Soldier morale, that is; lousy, lousy, lousy soldier morale. And of course having two bandit gangs on day 3 with one of them having 4 members, while I am sitting there with my 7 dwarves and only one of them a NCO. Also some kind of balance issue. Of course, you could say "tough luck, re-roll!" And that would be a valid response.
I'm having a bit of trouble adjusting to this new immigration/overseer thing. Where before I had a small handfull of overseers with a nice supply of immigrants to scoot around wherever I needed work done, now I get nearly 20 overseers within a week or two, with only 2-3 people per work group because you no longer get near enough people to fill out the ranks. While its nice to be able to have so many projects going at once, it seems like the actual work being done is slowing to a crawl. Everything takes an extra day or two to get done now. Not to mention the random immigrant roll only gives you 1 redcoat (if you're lucky) for every 10 workers. So now i've got military officers out the wazoo, but generally only one or two of them ever get a footsoldier assigned. ...that is if they don't all get slaughtered within the first few days from a passing hostile group of soldiers. Mmmm balancing.
Hmm. This suggests you're getting overseers way faster than I intended. If you haven't launched the game since playing this session, uploading a console.txt (found in my documents/gaslamp games/clockwork empires) would be great. It overwrites itself whenever you launch the game though so no biggie if you don't. Either way I already have a few plans for stabilizing this that'll probably go in whenever the next non-hotfix patch is. It's going to take a bit to get the curve exactly right across a majority of players, but the more data I can get from ya'll the better. Part of this is definitely the overseer issue you're experiencing, (and you can totally conscript people too!) but... hmm. I'll have to think about this.
In my last couple of games (v.40) that went up to day 30-40 I had no problems at all with an overseer flood. With random immigration I got mostly workers, often up to 4, with the occasional overseer, footsoldier, even naturalist thrown in. If I remember correctly in my last game I got 1 naturalist, 1 NCO and a small number of overseers in random immigration. I would've supplemented that with 1 or 2 squads from the prestige 'take your pick' as well as 1 naturalist and several overseers. Furthermore I've had NCO and clerics from the criminal release option even. Not many, but some. In one game I ended up with 3 upper crust folk in my village over that time period; don't remember t'other. Some assignments simply only need one overseer or one overseer with one labourer to work. Carpentry shop, Pottery, Laboratory, Weaver's don't need any assistants. Mines seem to work well for me with 2 labourers, 2 kitchen gets away with 1-2 sous chefs until things get up towards 100 people .... so I think what I have been getting has been pretty well balanced in terms of distribution. One of the real problems is military might in the startup phase. If you get an unlucky roll and 5 hostile soldiers or 6 bandits descend on your camp before you've e'en had one footsoldier to help out .... it gets dire. But, in a way, that's life, innit?
