Sort of like Aliens vs Predator. PDF would be horrifying, you could play as a deamon and hope around on ceilings and stuff and tear apart your enemies, and then you could be a Grey Knight and feel like an unstoppable killing machine with all your Force Weapons and jazz.

This sounds to me more like a Lictor or some another agile Tyranid species gameplay.

Genestealer cult can easily replace Chaos cult, and Deathwatch Marine can replace Grey Knight.

just bought the "assault on black reach" box. #winning (I hope :p)

I think all races from 40K can be considered evil from a certain perspective but overall they are more motivated by their own gains. Dark Eldar however are the exception as they choose and enjoy doing what they do. If you read the Torturer's Tale it implies they once had a purpose with their experiments but they have long forgotten it. Devouring souls is a way to fight the thirst but they don't need to do it in the amount they do, they simply enjoy it.

I wish there was a real video game equivalent to the tabletop game. I always wanted to play but the idea of purchasing a working army and trying to find time with the local community put me off. I almost bought a Grey Knights set but I put it off (funny, it was just before I joined a different Marine Corps). When I get a working gaming computer again, I'll have to get DoW but its just not the same.

they wouldn't make nearly as much money off of an actual digital version. so they wouldn't do it. of course doing a kind of cross promotion thing where buying the models gives you a code so that you get both a digital representation and a physical one would keep the hobby going, and get more people actually playing, if they don't have time or locations otherwise.

Its kind of like trying to find a good D&D experience (I haven't tried D&D online but I assume it is the closest). Tabletop and RPG's are hard to pull off these days especially when you leave highschool. There is one little gameshop in my town tucked underneath a mexican restaurant. Oh well, at least the games they do make are fun. Didn't the first DoW include all races? I will probably start with that.

Well the main reason for that is the plot of Dark Crusade made sense while the plot of Soulstorm made none. There was a tangeable well thought out reason why the Space Marines and the Imperial Guard battled directly when one would assume they would normally combine their forces like in vanilla Dawn of War and Winter Assault. Soulstorm however had the Sisters of Battle and Imperial Guard fighting simply because they started on the same planet. It's not the Sisters' place to start wiping out humans suspected of heresy that's the job of the Inquisition. The Sisters of Battle are supposed to be an inspiration to Imperal forces not judge, jury and executioner. Similarly the Dark Eldar were monumentally stupid to set up shop right next to the Chaos forces when there was a planet with the infinitely more soft and squishy Guard and Sisters to go and plunder. It went against everything we know about Dark Eldar lore.

Most of the fluff abuse in Soulstrom was purely down to Iron Lore developing it instead of Relic. If Relic had developed it the map would have been re-arranged to be far more fluffy and they never would have had that complete drooling idiot Indrik Boreale in charge of the Space Marines. I highly doubt Steel Rain is actually in the Codex Astartes and if it is then he did it wrong. The fact Cyrus in Dawn of War 2 calls the whole campaign a disaster for the Blood Ravens goes some way to showing how Relic felt about Soulstorm. Boreale was even named and Cyrus was not kind about him.

DoW vanilla didn't have all races, but with all of the races it got close, but was missing Space wolves, Tyranids and Chaos Daemons if I recall correctly.

I'd probably get a combo set, didn't Dark Crusade have Grey Knights? I think there is even a mod that allows you to field a complete GK army.

There are Grey Knights units for the Space Marines. And yes, a mod for a full army.

Dawn of War:
- Space Marines
- Craftworld Eldar
- Chaos
- Orks
Winter Assault:
- Space Marines
- Craftworld Eldar
- Chaos
- Orks
- Imperial Guard
Dark Crusade:
- Space Marines
- Craftworld Eldar
- Chaos
- Orks
- Imperial Guard
- Tau
- Necrons
Soulstorm:
- Space Marines
- Craftworld Eldar
- Chaos
- Orks
- Imperial Guard
- Tau
- Necrons
- Dark Eldar
- Sisters of Battle
Dawn of War II:
- Space Marines
- Craftworld Eldar
- Orks
- Tyrannids
Chaos Rising:
- Space Marines
- Craftworld Eldar
- Orks
- Tyrannids
- Chaos
Retribution:
- Space Marines
- Craftworld Eldar
- Orks
- Tyrannids
- Chaos
- Imperial Guard

As a Tyranid guy, I did prefer DoW2.

To me less of a focus on building and more on ordering units about felt more Warhammer-y than all of the base building from DoW1.