Depending what domain of cellular automata you're talking about this might be trivial -- just redefine the state space of the cell to also include which cells it is connected to, then all that information is available to use in update rules.

I mean even phrasing what you're trying to do there, would be a big difficult task.

Consider e.g. that Game of Life has had folks build universal Turing machines for it, and those machines can be programmed to run a Lace automaton.