Hi! It's always nice to see new players trying out New Leaf.
In New Leaf, you don't have to do anything like buying plots to get new villagers. After you start your town, a random villager will move in each day or every couple days after that until you reach 9 villagers. The game will automatically prioritize giving you villagers of a personality type that you don't have. The max number of villagers is 10, but you can only get a 10th villager by inviting them from the campsite, inviting them from another player's town, scanning in an Amiibo card, or picking up another player's voided villager by interacting with them online.
Unfortunately, since you don't get to place the plots, the villagers' houses can appear anywhere on the map and they often end up in inconvenient places like in front of your house, in front of Town Hall, in front of Re-Tail. However, with the Welcome Amiibo update, villagers won't place their houses on patterns on the ground as long as there is an open (and valid) area for them to place their house. So if you want to block off certain areas, you can just place a bunch of patterns down in those spots to prevent villagers from plotting there. They can be the default patterns or anything.
You can get villagers from other players by visiting their town when the villager is in boxes and asking them to move to your town. You can start doing this as early in the game as you like, but you can only invite one villager per day. If you try to invite more, the most recent invite will override the prior one, I think. You can also pick up villagers accidentally from other players through their void. If they let a villager move out and that villager was not adopted by someone else, it is now in the void and if you interact that player online, you risk picking up their voided villager.
That's all I can think of right now, but hope it helps.
