At 0:30 in the video you can see that they finally loosened tile placement a little bit - you can place improvements diagonally from existing ones in that build. I'm glad I won't have to cram everything so tight anymore.

Is it just me or is it ironic that the hidden temple can't be seen?

so we're not worried about being contagious anymore?

Pioneers probably become obsolete now. Except for founding cities, of course.

Looks great!

One thing I'd change is how borders look so very square. Would it be possible to make them look more curved? Or use a cross shape for influence like Civ4?

I can see this happening too.

Suggestion: make it so the cost of founding a city is increased the further away it is from the rest of your cities and especially from your capital. Some formula like this, with more balanced numbers:

cost of new city = [number of existing cities - 1]*50 + [distance to capital*10] + [distance to closest city*10]

and then use the outpost idea and

cost of new outpost = [number of existing cities+outposts - 1]*20 + [distance to closest city or outpost*10]

Different factions can have different modifiers of this, too, to add some differentiation in city-spam levels. Like the expansive and organized traits in Civ4.

SMAC comes to mind where factions like the Hive [despotic, ascetic communialists] were brilliant for ICS [infinite city spam] while others were accustomed to building very few, but high quality cities, like the Morganites [corporate, luxurious free marketeers].

Hm.  Good job with the multiplier idea.  Very good improvement.  However...

From the looks of it, cities are very, very close to each other.  What does this imply?  This implied that the player will be effectively snagging every resource that is near them and that, by the end of the game, pretty much every square of the map will be taken by some kind of sovereign faction.

What I was hoping was that players would have to choose carefully where they would build their cities and, consequently, what resources they would be able to exploit.  For instance players, at the beginning, I would like the player to have dozens of good candidate locations for cities, but could only choose maybe a 10th of them before they run out of a means to support further cities (out of available food, possibly).  This would add a more strategic element to the game because players would have to choose between what resources they "wild spaces" that appear to be largely missing once players expand outward. 

Right now, the map looks like a mid to late game civilization match, which concerns me.

I absolutely agree, I don't like this at all. Here is my reply in regard to this.

I second that. 

The cities can get  to crowded/close to eachother.  I realize that this is a fuction of the changes regarding building anywhere w/in zone of control, which is a positive change....I don't know how to resolve the issue.   Will there be options for really large maps...and ones that have more wide open spaces and less choke points.   I also did not perceive any defensive walls for the cities. Will that be in or is that in the game already? Otherwise everything else seems to be looking good.

It would be really really dumb to build your cities tightly together. Your best bet is to build fewer cities that are spread apart and connected by roads.

Seconded. Wars start from boundaries and are waged to move them.

I like Tormy's Watchtower Idea.  Is there anything like this in the lastest iteration?  (see Reply #66 and its link)

Good news!