Ok, major update time!
If you've previously played Wasteland but were turned off by the difficulty in understanding how town growth works, this update might be a good time to give it another try 
As teased earlier, the alpha-6 build is bringing some big quality-of-life features to (hopefully) improve the gameplay experience and make things like town growth much easier to understand and master. There are some other changes too which are described below. A lot of this is still a bit experimental so feedback is appreciated, especially whether the new town growth information is useful or not
Brace yourselves, this will be a long post. Skip to the end if you just want to get the file and start playing
First on the list is the Town Hall, as shown earlier:
What does the Town Hall do?
===================================
- [+] Spoiler
-
Nothing. For now, anyway.
It just shows you information about how you're doing with town growth (see this post for a screenshot). It is, however, now required to exist in a town before the town is allowed to grow. If it doesn't spawn on map generation in the town you want, it can be funded for free in the fund industry window. It must be placed in or near towns (obviously).
Why is it required for town growth? Technical reasons. I won't bore you with the details (unless you want them), but it is necessary or else everything breaks
New Cargo Acceptance Behavior
=======================================
As a side effect of storing the town information for use in the Town Hall, there is a slight change to the way towns accept cargo. Previously, any town building within range of the catchment area of a station would detect cargo delivery and be allowed to grow. However, it is now limited to only the town to which the station belongs, i.e. the town in the station name**.
**At least with the first station - if others are built nearby, other towns may then detect those cargo deliveries. It seems a bit inconsistent so far in testing, so let me know what you experience.
This means if you have two towns close together with a station in between, only the town the station is named after will receive cargo and be allowed to grow. This can be worked around by using transfer orders and using separate stations in each town for the final delivery, which is usually a good idea anyway to keep deliveries more frequent It does mean though you may no longer be able to 'station walk' to include nearby small towns, or grow two cities at once with a single station. I know, it hurts a little for me too 
Also town growth is no longer limited to the area immediately near the station, but applies to the whole town receiving cargo. This is mostly necessary to keep the information window consistent with what is actually happening. For example, it would make no sense if the Town Hall said the town was growing, but in reality only a few building plots were within range of a station accepting cargo, so most of the town was doing nothing. That would only confuse players, and confusion is what this change is attempting to help with
It may be possible to limit this a bit by keeping new buildings from spreading too far from existing ones of the same type, but honestly this would only slightly delay the inevitable spread everywhere, so I wasn't convinced there is much benefit to adding a bunch of special casing to prevent it.
Anyway, this change may not be seen as a good one to some people, but it is unavoidable. Hopefully the overall playability will increase enough to offset the inconvenience
Known Limitations
======================
- The Town Hall is just a yellow cube
Yes, this is just a placeholder for easy ID'ing while some proper graphics are made Testing comes first!
- The goals from the previous level do not change to reflect actual cargo deliveries, they are "frozen" at YES.
Short reason: Technical limitation.
Long reason:
- [+] Spoiler
-
In the industry window, there is only one string available to show additional text. This means that to have an information window like this which "dynamically" changes with new information, you actually need to make a new string for every single possible combination of options. For a bunch of YES/NO options like this, that is 2^x strings. So if I have 5 different options, I need 2^5 = 32 unique strings to be able to show each possible combination.
As it is done now, with the previous levels "frozen", there are 44 unique combinations possible (plus a few special cases). If all of the options could change all the time, that would require 1,156 individual strings. Even ignoring the hard limit of 1,024 strings here, there's no way I would do that
As for why I leave the previous levels in the window at all: it is to remind you what is necessary to keep building the current/previous stage, since the window updates as soon as it is possible to start working on the next one, not necessarily when you can stop doing what's needed for the current one.
- If you start the game with the houses already at a more advanced level, the text still assumes you did something to achieve that.
Related to above^, but basically too much work to "fix" for too little benefit.
- The text does not take into account the additional requirements for town growth in the arctic, tropic, and toyland climates
This is a general problem with Wasteland as a whole, the gameplay doesn't take that into account yet. Hopefully in the future, but for now you'll just have to work around it if you want to play those climates
New Parameters
====================
- [+] Spoiler
-
As part of the re-write that was necessary to make the Town Hall work, I've included a new parameter to adjust the interval of time allowed for cargoes to be delivered for town growth. It still defaults to 2 months, but can now be set anywhere from 1 to 12 months. If you've previously had trouble delivering all cargoes in time, setting this to a higher value should help out greatly
For example, I played a test game with this parameter set to 6 months, and I found it gave enough extra time to allow for train-only transport for all cargoes (i.e. no transfers with road vehicles), without making things too easy. I'm sure people will find this setting very welcome
===========================
Another parameter I added is the one requested by Michpi to allow tweaking the duration of the Wastelander boost. This can now be configured to last between 1 to 6 months, with the default still being 2 months.
It should be noted, however, that the behavior of the quadruple boost bonus has changed slightly. Due to now being configurable, the total amount of Wastelanders which must be delivered changes depending on the duration of the setting. You must deliver an average of 200 Wastelanders per month for each month specified in the setting.
For example, if it is set to 4 months, you must then deliver a total of 800 Wastelanders within the time period to activate the boost. This counter is constantly revolving, though, so if you under-deliver for one month the boost may temporarily stop if you don't make up the difference. In other words, the 4x boost is not necessarily guaranteed for four months like the double boost, but rather (in this example) you have a 4-month window to deliver a total of 800 Wastelanders. Basically, as long as you maintain delivering 200 per month, the boost should remain active after you reach the threshold.
I'm not sure if I've managed to explain this well enough in the short bit of text shown in the industry window, so let me know if you have a problem with it, or can think of a better way to describe it
Other Stuff
==============
- [+] Spoiler
-
- removed extra info from municipal hub window as it is no longer useful
- added the doom buggy for low capacity rv transport (as shown earlier)
- fixed the steel mill production meter being incorrect on full production
- reworked all mine industries to use functions for production code, to reduce duplication
- mine industries now have a chance of spawning with slightly higher production values, thanks to a happy accident as a result of the above change
- changed the mine industry windows to use the VU-meter style production indicator and updated their descriptions
The End
==========
Keep in mind this is a
very major update under the hood, so don't be too critical if I've missed something
I've tested it myself with a couple of playthroughs where I tried to break it, and at least so far it seems to be okay.
But if you encounter any issues, as always, do please let me know. In particular with this update, savegames will come in handy when diagnosing issues, so keep that in mind
Note that this update is,
once again, not compatible with any previous versions. Sorry about that!
Enjoy!
Seriously though, there is a lack of large ship capacity which could be handy to make them more useful, so I'll add that to my list as well 
