Not sure about this whole online thing but I think the game might take the same approach as CoC2 has and appear on steam, far as I can tell the CoC2 one on steam can be played offline but you have to buy it for about 8-9$ and the version you get access to is the public one. So chances are high that at least eventually the public version will be removed as the game get's closer to completion, which is understandable, and my guess is TiTs will be added to steam but I'm pretty sure they will keep it like CoC2 that you can play if offline when they do.