I'm interested in buying the game, and I emailed sales@stardock about 10 days ago, yet no reply. So if anyone here could answer these questions I'd be grateful.

I was looking for a regular boxed copy, but cannot seem to find one. I read on one of the faq's on the galciv2 forums that there was an option to buy a boxed copy during the checkout process for the digital download. I could not seem to find this. Is this still available?

I'm willing to just buy the digital download, but I would like assurances that no other software is required to either download, register, or play it. (I will never use Steam, for example, for this reason). As long as I can just download the game itself, that would be ok. If a download manager is required just for the actual download, then I could deal with that as long as a) I can move the downloaded game to another PC, for example, and I could uninstall the download manager with no effect on functionality of the game.

Also, in the ultimate edition, is it possible to play the game as the original only, ie, without the expansions. I always like to play a vanilla game before additions.

Thanks for your time.