dp opened the ticket and wrote:

When town runs a search for a place to expand it can turn on crossroad even if can't build anything in that direction. For example (see picture) there can be a depot or an industry or a clear tile(and allow_town_roads is off). That results in it skipping a growth try (~day) and thus slows down growth speed. This behavior is very poorly documented and only few pro players know about it. Anyone else usually doesn't pay attention to such things and get a noticeable decrease in growth speed without any visible reason (that matters the most on citybuilder servers ofc).

Also this makes using a depot in town a huge nuisance because to do that without risking growth speed every time you have to disconnect road with it from layout, connect depot, start trucks, wait for them to get out, disconnect depot and connect road back. One more irritating thing is a half-road dead ends. Not only they are much worse than full roads for growth speed due to # 6240, but also houses can grow around them preventing further extension of road. And since road building tools leave half-roads by default you have to do extra click or use dynamite.

When town can build roads there are obviously less limitations.

So this patch adds an extra check before selecting direction to go, which prevents most of aforementioned cases. The reason I didn't check all cases possible and settled with a simple test only is that it would require either duplication of functionality or changing the whole way expansion search works (to make check it tile before going to it). And whilst potentially I can do that, I'd like to hear some feedback first to avoid wasting time on something that would never be used.

This behavior can also be viewed as ability for town expansion search to return one tile back in case it failed (although that's not the way it works).

Attachments

• cs-cases.png (84.81 KiB)
• smarter-growth.diff (4.21 KiB)

Reported version: 1.5.0-beta2
Operating system: All

This issue was imported from FlySpray: https://bugs.openttd.org/task/6245