Questions about NTW

I am thinking about buying a new game as I haven't in years (who needs to when community based mods are far more entertaining) and I am considering buying Napoleon total war. I am asking a community as it is far less likely to be biased than the increasingly unreliable Sega/CA.
I have a few questions:
1. How fast is the campaign map speed (during AI turns)? ETW campaigns were quite fun until the campaign slowed down to frustrating levels.
2. What's new? Why should I spend my money on a new game when I could just download a mod?
3. Have Sega/CA released mod tools? From my understanding of the engine, ETW tools made by modders work with NTW, and DBEditor is great, but I would like something with a much more user-friendly interface, especially for the startpos editor, which works fine, but can take quite a while to make changes.
4. If there are changes, are they gameplay changes? I couldn't care less about graphics changes, and preferred the graphics from M2TW and RTW, however, once again, this is something that modders can do (and tend to do a better job), however significant changes to the engine are worth paying for.

Any help would be appreciated, thanks.

1. How fast is the campaign map speed (during AI turns)? ETW campaigns were quite fun until the campaign slowed down to frustrating levels.

Yes it is much faster and if your computer can manage to download it, then you should definably be able to see some improvement.

2. What's new? Why should I spend my money on a new game when I could just download a mod?

There are some new things that have been added.

4. If there are changes, are they gameplay changes? I couldn't care less about graphics changes, and preferred the graphics from M2TW and RTW, however, once again, this is something that modders can do (and tend to do a better job), however significant changes to the engine are worth paying for.

Yes there are some minor changes although game play seems to be somewhat the same.
All in all, if you did like empire then you should get Napoleon or if you are just looking for somewhat of a change of having the strange graphics of empire in to rather having the much better graphics of Napoleon then again you should try to get it especially if it is on sell.

NTW has possessed me more than any other of the TW series, even though I'm really a big fan of the late Roman period.

The AI land campaign and battle strategy is way better than ETW. The game is also is also remarkably stable compared to ETW which is even more amazing because of the far greater graphic detail of NTW. Diplomacy actually works very well too.

On the downside the naval campaign and naval trade strategy still sucks. The Human player will take over naval trade and money wise will out compete the AI. The large stream of money aside the land AI can give you quite a bloody nose.

Well worth the measly price it's going for these days, I'd give it a go. The French are the most interesting side to play in this game.