Now if CA would just add a few lines of code to make sure that in hotseat mode you can only autoresolve the battles to make sure nobody "cheats" by fighting the AI and winning too crushing victories.
heh, what would be the fun of that? A total war game with no battles isn't even a total war game.

This is better than nothing, and I guess I can deal with auto resolving all battles vs human opponents if I can still get *real* battles vs the AI opponents, but the dream is to be able to do a *real* multiplayer (over LAN or internet) where the battles can be played out as well.

If there was some way to take a campaign game saved file, and plug the battle information into the custom battle creater, and then take the results of a custom battle and plug them back into a campaign game saved file, it should be doable.