How's Assassin's Creed 2 DRM on steam now?

I plan to buy AC2 and brotherhood when the winter sale starts so I just want to confirm the DRM scheme Ubi has now.

It requires a uplay id, steam opens the uplay launcher and then you play the game normally, right? I remember reading that using ubi's own cloud saving has a tendency to corrupt local saves, is it still true? Any activation non-sense such as using it on a new PC will cause it to throw up a fuss, etc.? Starting steam in offline mode will not cause any problems with AC2, ie. ability to play offline when needed? Anything else I should know about it?

Thanks in advance!