You know I'm looking forward to this one, Curt!
I see you're cutting down on naval units. I suppose with the current map I can't blame you. I do think this would be an interesting game to make multimap and extend it south with the second one to Panama. There's an awful lot of fun you might explore in trying to seize control of the drug trade routes, and the canal zone could become a major source of conflict for the Empire and California Union.
In HoF, as you'll soon see, I did achieve true east-west movement for both the human and AI (well, I only got the AI going one direction and stopped there, but with creativity it's possible to achieve both).
Just throwing it out there. It's your baby but for a scenario about the catastrophic decline and then rebirth of the preeminent naval power, you'd think a few more of their ships would be mucking about!
Edit - got so excited to see this I didn't even think that we were in an art thread. Sorry for the hijack all!