The possibility of an off-line mode has been considered from day one. I’m periodically coming to back to it, but the benefits never outweigh the problems. Some random thoughts on this:
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Most of the MMO aspect of CIU is kept on the servers, and client can’t even run a local simulation. So any potential off-line mode would be constrained to the arcade (mission) portion only.
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Due to cheating concerns, you would not be allowed to merge your progress with your career even if you later came on-line.
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Since the game is free-to-play, there is no business incentive to do this because there would be nothing to gain (and, in fact, a lot to lose from an advertisement/IAP revenue standpoint). It could of course be tied into CHL, except you see how popular that is in the poll.
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The technical work required to get this working would be about half of creating a brand new episode, and I’d much rather do the latter if it ever came to that (again, see above point).
It’s still an open issue, however.