Civ2-style units in Civ4?

I like a lot of what has been done with Civ4, but being a longtime fan of Civ2 as the pinnacle of the series, I dislike 3D, animated units. Also, my system baaaaaarely meets the minimum criteria to run Civ4, so I have a practical reason to go low-res.

I am considering doing a mod of Civ4 that replaces all the unit graphics with more Civ2-style units (I did the same in Civ3 with great success, but abandoned Civ3 due to its buggy multiplayer). I'd probably also go with static leaderheads, and maybe cutting out other animations, like terrain improvements and resources.

My first question is: has anyone already begun a project like this? I scoured the forum but couldn't find any indication that anyone had.

If not, was someone planning on doing this?

If not, how difficult do you experienced-Civ4-modders expect it would be?

In particular, how would the ability to move the camera around in Civ4 affect a flat unit?

Also, to what extent would you expect a less-animated version of Civ4 to run more quickly on a computer that currently runs it at a slug's pace? Or is its slowness just attributable to Python and XML?

I'm totally new to modding Civ4, so forgive my ignorance.

I have an idea.
One could make a simple square polygon at a certain angle, than assign one texture to diffuse ,another to opacity channel and export it as .nif. After that all you had to do is change these textures for whatever unit you want.
This way you would have 1 generic very simple 3d unit which could used for all the units by simply changing texture.
My guess is it could improve performance a little bit.

That would be good.

You know, I do sometimes turn off improvement animations and stuff...the problem is...half of them still animate!

the LH's are already done in a mod (i think in the graphics modpack section)