My girlfriend and I do most of our gaming together and are looking to play the Unreal games together and against each other. Before purchasing the games I'd like to ask a few questions, hopefully consolidating a bunch of information into one thread in the process:

-is it possible to create a LAN server for multi-player games? If so, what steps would need to be taken?

-aside from the oddity with Unreal 2's multi-player, are there different procedures for hosting multi-player games for each of the offered Unreal games (Unreal Gold, Tournament GotY and Tournament 2004)?

-is it possible to play with only two players, with AI members filling up the rest of the spots? In respect to this, I mean (a) playing against each other, so one human player on each team, and the rest being AI and (b) playing with each other, so that both human players are on one team, and the rest being AI so that one team was made up entirely of AI.

These are the three questions that come to mind at the moment. If any others come to mind I will edit this post to indicate such. Thank you in advance for your help, folks, it's greatly appreciated.

Yep, I'll just assume you don't want a dedicated server. for UT99 and Unreal Gold goto Multiplayer Menu -> Start Multiplayer Game -> (Choose your settings eg Tournament Team Game (TDM) pick your map such as DM-Deck16][
any mutators you want) Most settings are pretty straight forward and then in the bots tab pick your difficulty and set the min total players you want eg 16 = 16 players where 14 will be bots +2 human players
then click Start.

Now to join a game just goto multiplayer menu -> find lan games and it should be listed under lan servers but just watch out for windows firewall exceptions which could stop it showing up.
Alternatively you can use the open location option under multiplayer menu and just put in the ip address manually to the host computer. Yep just switch to different teams in your player profile with one player on red and one on blue.
As for humans vs bots you can manually go and change all the bots to be on the team you want but that takes forever but there is a mutator that I assume is supposed to do this exact thing except it appears ut-files.com is dead :( but I found it on uttexture.com so all good http://uttexture.com/UT/Downloads/Mods/Mutators/Misc/humansvsbots100.zip

EDIT: if you do it manually you have to turn of force balance teams so that it lets you have uneven teams.

Rock on. I'll run this by her and see what she thinks. Thank you very much for the reply.