I remember seeing a suggestion a while ago which pointed out that there's currently no incentive to decorate stations. Why not give this incentive.
A station tile could do various things:
- Increase the time duration a cargo can be kept at a station, before it gets removed.
- Make the station more attractive to industries to provide cargo to, simply because this facility is there.
- Increase the amount of cargo (of one or more types) that can be kept at the station. A setting could determine whether there are limits to what a station can store. The setting could set a hard limit per station, make the limit dependent on the amount of station tiles or a combination thereof.
- Provide revenue because specific cargoes are kept there (think a shopping centre on top of a station) newgrfs could determine what a tile provides per x amount of cargo per period (day, month, year), maybe even modifiable per tile.
- Increase loading speed of certain cargoes, when a vehicle requesting the cargo is of the correct type and (possibly) sits in the correct platform.
- Decrease the amount of a specific cargo a station can hold (think of passengers at a cargo station).
- Make the station outright reject certain cargoes (think of a valuables station).
A station tile could provide any combination of these effects, making the player constructing the station really think about how they select and place the station tiles.
On top of that, can station newgrfs be made to be able to optionally provide a long description per tile, so they could explain what each station tile does?