Using Editors....there are good points and bad points to doing it this way. They take a lot of the pain out of some aspects of the job, but they indirectly make troubleshooting harder when you don't know exactly what they actually do to the files! You also need to be aware of the things they DON'T do. Like th eTIME map editor...it doesn't make you a finished campaign ready map, so there is still some manual editing to do. It's really a question of using whatever tool you feel most comfortable with. Read the tutorials to understand what is going on, and then go with whatever suits you. If it works...great

As far as having a unique skin for each soldier in the game...nope. Not possible. EAch specific unit type can have it's own skin, but in order to make each man in your 240 strong huge unit have his own design....well, imaging how many skins would need to be created to achieve that. The resource requirements would be huge, as well. Each texture used must be loaded up and rendered every frame. Using the same texture multiple times is a lot less stressful on graphics resource.

As far as a maximum campaign map size goes, I don't remember ever seeing one. As well as the 200 province limit, there is also a maximum of 20 seperate land masses. I think there is also a 50 pixel limit between cities or else the AI pathfinding gets messed. Check the stickied 'hard coded limits' thread through...I am sure it is in there.