Originally posted by Martin:

Yeh I'm fairly sure it requires a login through either steams system or via a specific database to net all the players together. Maybe in time they'll make a proper offline lan mode.. or a modder might do it faster..

I think you're right, which is a bummer. I think my scenario is too a minority scenario that no one is going to take a big interest in fixing. I was just hoping there was a button I needed to click somewhere.