Ok I don't know much about game network protocols, so this maybe is impossible.

But, would it be possible to packet sniff a lan game to work out the network protocol used by RTW? Like when you move unit forward, would the machine send a packet saying "MOVE UNIT 12 TO 567,788 1"?

Ok so if you could work out how this works, you could write bot players - a program that knows how to communicate with a RTW lan game and all the clever programmers out there could write descent AI algorithms.

It seems that one of the biggest hard coded issues with RTW is the AI - it stinks and theres nothing you can do about it. Would this get around it?

Of course, if the game uses some remote method calling system, DCOM/Corba whatever, then I suppose its not really feasible.