Uh....    that is the craziest thing I've ever heard.   There is no reason to say "no" anything, just "more focus on...."   Like, not only is that bad juju (karma, or just quantum energy.  Always be positive, never negitive, and life will be better for everybody) but its a silly thing to say.  

I**   want them to spend 20 billion dollars on the budget, give me a job, and maket he most awesome game with dynamic voice acted cut scenes and controls that include options for sync with my wiimote via hacked blue tooth firmware.  But I'm not about to tell them to not work on multiplayer for it.

Also, I've been wanting a multiplayer remake of master of magic since 1995 (actually, probebly 1998 since in 1995 I was just playing it and didn't really consider multiplayer features and it wasn't until after heroes of might and magic 2 did I realize what master of magic was missing).  Like, who needs story design.   Not me!    they can cut-paste master of magic with good multiplayer support.  They don't even need to upgrade the graphics beyond just being able to be higher than 800x600 support and I'd fork over $40 for it.  So to me, the whole is-3D thing and has-story is all extra fluff and depth. 

Although i can understand the feeling of "Don't screw SP in the name of MP", i think that Stardock doesn't intend that. In any case, Stardock needs to add multiplayer to this game to create all the needed infraestructure and stuff needed to add multiplyer for later games (like Gal Civ 3 or Society). It's true that multiplayer can affect depth of a game (in the sense of tons of units, mechanics...) but in this case, i don't think it will happen as such considering the modding nature of the game. Also, fluff shouldn't suffer (much?) i hope.