question

There will be the collectors edition.

see this thread: 

https://forums.sinsofasolarempire.com/422821

so, it seems you will have to pre-order rebellion in-order to pre-order the collectors.

I believe there will be a hard copy of the game, yes, and concerning steam...

"The Steam client will be required for Sins of a Solar Empire: Rebellion for initial install, updates and Internet multiplayer, regardless of purchase location. You can choose to play in offline mode via the Steam client after initial install, though ICO features and achievements will no longer be available."

Straight from Yarlen.

EDIT: I'm a noob, and hijacking this thread. Who IS Yarlen, anyway? Is he like a public relations type employee of Stardock, or exactly? For some reason I'm imagining him like Pete Hines with a fake mustache and a sombrero. A couple minutes of searching, strangely, didn't get me an answer. If you know the answer for any other of the devs too, feel free to share.

I DID learn Frogboy and Yarlen both worked on Gal Civ 2, though, which makes me grin for some reason.

Yarlen is your god.

That is all you need to know.

Yarlen seems to be the main developer from Stardock in charge of Sins. You'll notice he's the one posting the change logs and has a Stardock employee under his picture when he posts. He's also the only on besides Blair Fraser and Frogboy (the CEOs of Ironclad and Stardock) giving interviews with the media.

ok ty all  for your info. i did pre-order rebellion. i love the sins of a solar empire games. i just dont want them to go thru steam for us to play the games.  

Use steam or else..

don't listen to the propaganda campaign about steam sucking.

don't be a victim of peer pressure

don't be poisoned by the media.

You will use Steam. You will enjoy Steam. You are unhappy when Steam is not running on your computer.

Actually I could start Rebellion with steam offline without a problem...?

I don't see the big discussion about steam, it works most of the time, people mess up there same I do when I fry my PC again. Last week they killed steam for most of the german population for a day. Shit happens. They try to do a lot stuff to improve gaming and everything around it. They succeed and sometimes they fail miserably. Nothing to stigmatize or glorify about it.

I sometimes resent the fact you don't get a retail copy of games bought via steam, but until now I haven't had any trouble playing the few games I've bought there directly and it doesn't seem they'll go bankrupt in the near future, so I guess it's an acceptable loss (most of the games I bought directly via steam don't have a retail version anyways lol).