Thank you for this thread. I rarely play an MP game (Work, family, time zones). I dropped into the MP forum just to see what was going on and ya'll may have helped me solve a problem. I want to be able to turn off unit animations in SP. Looking under the hood for a solution hasn't been very helpful so far. That the animations are turned off by default in MP gives me something new to investigate.
Go to advanced set up and it is one of the options that you can check.