One thing to bear in mind is that the centre point must be a road tile as the algorithm follows roads, so you'd need to find a suitable road tile near the starting point. Doing so would also help the long standing issue (that is probably used deliberately by some players) that if the central road tile is removed a town cannot grow.

One thing to bear in mind is that the centre point must be a road tile as the algorithm follows roads, so you'd need to find a suitable road tile near the starting point. Doing so would also help the long standing issue (that is probably used deliberately by some players) that if the central road tile is removed a town cannot grow.

On that same method, there is already logic for that using data on lines 1692-1706. That same logic would apply here with stations.
Though, maybe that list of "search areas" (called "_town_coord_mod[]") may need some "enlarging" as the stations can be quite big. :)

There are many (good) ideas on how to improve town growth. No doubt there :)

Sadly, an implementation for this is not trivial. This because we would like to have a generic solution where people can write their own town growth algorithm for. The main motivation here is that there are many of these ideas, and we cannot implement them all. In the past we used to do that, which resulted in many many settings, which are very hard to maintain and hard to make sure the game isn't broken in any combination of them.

Additionally, we tend not to leave feature-requests on our issue-tracker. We have our forums for that, which is a much better incubator for ideas.

Normally I would say: if you want to learn C++, let us know, and we can see if we can help you out, but if I am being honest: this is not a good starting point :P It isn't easy to add a generic interface for it.
Of course if you just want to have fun and see what you can make town growth do, you should absolutely do that. And the forum will be very judgemental of the result (both positive and negative), so please do share any progress there :)

But for now, sadly, I will be closing this ticket. If any developer ever picks up making town growth scriptable, we will for sure keep this usecase in mind!

Tnx!