Bonk:
Take this idea, and ship it over to Max Power / Bearslayer / those people that play the F&E campaigns with the online graphic map which fight the battles on GSA and ship them this deal.
Set most hexes to DV1, that flip direct to the winner. They can arrainge the battles beforehand (like they are now), and fight them out on D2 instead of GSA. No AI, webmap ship purchasing so that people can grab whatever ships they need for the battle.
This way, instead of having to maintain a separate map, they can use the D2 map (keeping the server up all the time), without fear that a punk like me can go on and beat up 20 AI and screw up their setup...