How to setup and play on minimum data

Hi team,

A group of mates of mine are heading to catch up with one of our school mates who lives in the middle of no where. We used to play aoe when we were in school so though we'd have a few rounds over a couple of beers . You can get patchy 4G over mobile at his place but that's about it... We've all loaded steam and HD but we'll have to set him up when we get there.

I was thinking of downloading the latest steam setup file and putting it on a flash drive, does anyone know if I can also pre-download the game files and copy over when we get there?

In terms of play I can run a hotspot from my phone to get us all logged in and running - does anyone know if it's possible to switch to a LAN once steam has verified?

Many thanks in advance!