Hello, I try to explain everything to you.
1. When you fulfill all demands you may be happy that you have done everything you can to grow the city, but it is not true. More experienced opponents use some techniques to speed-up city growing. So, someone's city may grow faster that yours.
I do not tell you now what to do to speed-up the growth
You can find it by yourself or just dig into our forum. There are several discussion threads about city growing.
But I can tell you another "secret" (for encouragement
):
2. When you are using BTPro client (instead of original vanilla game) you can see the potential town population in the caption of your town window. Suppose you've got population of 2,712 but you see in caption 4,140. It means that the city will grow to 4,140 (because of the houses already in construction) no matter if you deliver required cargo or not. Some players stop everything when potential town grow meets the goal, and go "red" for next months. In such case the whole effort of the city is put in construction finishing, instead of starting new investments (new buildings). It gives the boost at the end of the game, and - in case of #13 - it can give you 25% of goal in just several months.
3. About web page "Population" column: unfortunatelly data about city population, company value, etc. is not sent very often to the server gathering games data (it is a simplified explanation of course). In result you can see population of 3,787 on reaching 4k goal - taken from the game - let's say - 30 seconds before reaching the goal.
4. Connection lost error + loosing the game = I believe it was the coincidence, your bad luck. Sometimes connection is lost, indeed. And due to the reasons mentioned in 1) and 2) you can miss out the moment of your opponent victory
Anyway,
I'm glad you enjoy the game (and BTPro servers)!
Happy gaming and see you around!