My pretender died for no reason!

[curtadams]

Maybe I'm misunderstanding how this works. Can Dominion pops get lost? I just ran a more extreme test and got a somewhat different result. I took no prophet and imprisoned pretender, as before, and played fake multiplayer so I didn't have to worry about the computer (duh...) This time the other player was far enough away to have no effect. I build 15 priests and then all at once built 15 extra temples, raising my maximum dominion to 4 (I checked on the recruitment screen). Anyway, I have 16 temples + home province = 17 checks. I forwarded through 6 turns. Expectations are:

No dominion improvement: 17*6*.1 = 10.2 pops
Dominion improvement: 17*6*0.4 = 40.8 pops

I actually got 18. This is way too few for the full improvement (p<.0001 cumulative that or below) but is a bit high for no improvement (p = .01 cumulative that or above). It's certainly not working the way I understand the manual, but what exactly is going on?