Is it possible to stop town buildings from expiring?

[HadronFive]

I have looked a lot into how towns and cities work in OpenTTD, and the hard limiting factor seems to be, that buildings have an expiry time. Towns will always slow down growing, since there are more and more buildings that hit their expiry time and have to be replaced, until the only action that is done by towns, is replacing buildings.

For me, the towns in OpenTTD are too small. Yes, for most small and medium-sized towns, they work great, but if you want to build a really big city with a neat transportation system, then those cities stop growing, before you can do anything realistic there. For example it would be nice to have the central station, and then 2-3 urban stations, before you get out of the city. In between there would be bus/tram services. The city sizes just don't allow for that. There is always a small downtown, and then a small urban zone by real-life standards, and then you are already at the border of the town.

Even adjusting the zone parameters in JGRPP doesn't allow for larger sizes, I've tried it, and the zones are just distributed differently. That makes sense, since the city still has to upkeep all these buildings, and that steals all the time for further growth.

I think disabling the expiration of buildings would be a quick way to allow for larger cities. You can then later activate it again when the city is large enough, then the city goes back to the upkeep, and you still have a changing city.

[LaChupacabra]

It seems that the element that limits the development of cities the most are... roads, or more precisely intersections. If you remove them, i.e. build your own road network without intersections, the city will grow much faster and reach larger sizes. I managed to build a city that took up the entire 1024x1024 map this way. I did it with the RWD script, which allows for extremely fast development, but it seems that without the script the city would also reach much larger sizes.

[+] Spoiler

However, by the way, I'm not convinced about the change in this direction, so that cities can easily reach monstrous sizes. In my opinion, without a script that would limit this, they grow too quickly and become disproportionately large in relation to the rest of the map.
But maybe some setting that would determine not the speed but the size of cities would be good? Maybe the rule that the more stops, the bigger the city can be? Or maybe, next to the rule of five stops, thanks to which the city grows at the highest possible speed, add an option where the speed of development would be determined by the percentage of transported residents and mail? Whenever I've played online, a lot of new players thought that's how it works. Sure, there are scripts, and there's even one that does it similar to the one described above, but scripts are still something that's cumbersome, limiting, and completely unknown to most players. Maybe it's worth adding some options to the game settings?

[cheese_gaming]

i also got a 256 by 256 map and managed to make a city with like 70k people and a town with abt 15k. made some plane routes between , and also NEVER FORGET:
GOODS ARE KEY TO A BIG CITY; i had 3 goods train lines and bus lines in the city and it still took me HOURS to do that. Personally, as he said, build roads so the city can outgrow the building decay