Metaverse what if question

Absolutely, you only need to be connected to the net and your Stardock account to start and then at the end to submit your game. There's no need to be even connected to the net while playing the game. If you're online when the game ends it will take you right into game submission. If you aren't or otherwise miss the opportuity you can simply reload the endgame.sav file and submit it at a later time. Sometimes the submission screws up but I've never heard of anyone being unable to either immediately resubmit the game or to come back later and submit it. Actually you can even submit the game and then later resubmit the same game, but you can only do this once.

This ,in effect, lets you play out the game from your earliest save in a different way to see if you can improve on the score.

I have never tried it myself, but I can see how it could be beneficial to those who want to streamline strategies...