by XofMdS
I am late to the party.1- I think the end of December does include the population adjustment, since the endgame calculations occur in phase 4.
2- not to diminish your overall optimisation, but some of your sea lines are illegal. The game specify that you cannot trace a sea line if there is no space in the board. Sure, my party did that stricly by the book, taking into account the line should have the same width as the one from the get go. I know ytou could draw very thin lines to really optimize.
Still, the board seams to be designed to have:
- only one sea line passing through danemark islands, so St Petersburg only get 1 sea line.
- same thing for the pass north of Australia: no way 3 lines could fit in (1, maybe 2).
- sea lines cannot cross other sea lines or black areas. So once Dar El Salam and Antananarivo are linked, You cannot link Antananarivo and New Mumbai (or the other way around).