*points* it stands there

Always nice of you Frogboy to come and point it out again, just wanted to thank you for that

Sincerely
~ Kongdej

Thanks for confirming that. 

Also, the image in the OP serves to reinforce something I've discovered while playing:  the cloth map is absolutely beautiful!  Nice job!!  I set the zoom level on it pretty low so I can play cloth map most of the time, and only zoom in to the "regular map" when I really have to.  Love it.

Will the Anthys map come with all 8 factions historically pre-placed?

Please say all 8 factions start pre-placed.

Yep, this exactly. We know it will be a long game, so we like the same level of FUN that the single player has ... that means all features, unbalanced and all

(at least normally ... eventually ppl will be calling for buffs and nerfs once they start playing a bit more competitively, but almost ANY singleplayer game can be multi-played in this fashion ... for the experience of playing the game you know and love against humans)

I love the new cloth map as well.  I use it most of the time, even though my PC handles the regular game graphics beautifully.  I just find it a little easier to see everything.

About the OP map image:  Is that the current size of the large maps (tile width and height) when using the random map generator?

and then somebody will make a mod for competitive MP

Nope. It's much bigger.

How many city spots will the huge Anthys map have? How many of those will be available from the start and how many will be obscured by the wildlands?

quite likely

I do. I have a friend whom I meet in quite regular fashion twice a week (our wives are having evening out for whatever type of physical torture they indulge themselves to). We meet and play CivV usually. I'd love him to buy FE so we could play MP just like I hoped we would with WoM and I couldn't force myself to advice him buying it. 

We spend at a meeting around 4 hours, we save and reload the game on next meeting. We can finish a typical small map to the end within a month (if it last that long, games are usually won in two meetings since backstab attacks are most satisfactionary event). 

This is the style a of MP gameplay I look for. This can be achieved by hotseat if needed, though LAN connection would work better (I'd rather not having Stardock servers option only, as my connection can be firewalled, but I'll work around this either)

Most of the codebase required for MP is already in place. It is there since WoM (just like dynasties). It was ported from some other game released just before WoM. What's needed is enabling it and adaptation to FE, which I believe can be difficult but an order of magnitude or two easier than writing from scratch. Mind you also that MP was a huge selling point of WoM for me, so missing this feature in replacement game is irritating (for lack of other word).

I am (as many others from that vocal minority) willing to pay for that effort. I've given up hope it will be in game or expansion (Fb said so multiple times). I still hold onto idea of DLC enabling it.  I'll myself bring another $50 for the game (friend copy), $10 for the MP DLC (on both copies) and $5 for the map DLC which I don't need or want but I'll buy if it will make MP DLC planned for delivery in 2014.