Yes, but it is just the first post. From then on we are more willing to accept that you are not a robot.
Gotcha.
First edition was a great game, and something extremely strategic, and was a game that you could completely immerse yourself in, but the depth and slow play made it's appeal very limited. It's probably my second favourite version.
First edition was great and I loved watching the system grow through WD but the speed of play was a killer for my group at that time playing in the evening. Second edition allowed enormous battles that could play out in 2-3 hours with 2-4 players.
Second edition is the one that I am least familiar with. I was out of wargaming largely at this point, and the bright colours that 40K was going through and the utter lack of detail in Epic miniatures just turned me away (see, for example, the second edition Vindictators). It seemed to react to the deep detail of first edition and reflect the younger focus of GW at the time by making the game more cartoony. Also, from reports, I feel that the game became about individuals leading units, not the units so much, and I have always been a fan of massed blocks of standard troops and the strategy in this type of battle.
The "red" phase at GW and some of the resculpts at that time weren't great, interestingly GW is going through that phase again with very toy like sculpts and paint jobs. I actually own a few of those old breeze block Vindicators, they're *ok* when painted but not a patch on the original first edition sculpts. They are probably the ugliest model from that era though.
As a game second edition did have a number of individuals and special characters but they never swayed the battle that much it was still about hoards of infantry and companies of tanks but it did feel cinematic. I guess the nearest comparison now is it felt a lot like an early RTS game played out with models.
Third edition gets a lot of bad press. In my opinion, the issue with third edition is that GW were attempting to appeal to the non-Epic players, and that was the biggest problem. They wanted a strategic game that played fast and brought across the movement of units across a battlefield and looked at things at a macro level. If you view third edition in the same way that a documentary on any WWII battle is viewed - movements, battalions destroyed, strategic goals - then it's a great game. However, the existing Epic player base largely played it because of the 40K background and the cinema, and this macro view watered down a lot of the specific issues that they enjoyed, while non-Epic players who may have liked it didn't even look at it because it was Epic. I think that the game would have done really well if it was called something else or produced by a different company. My third favourite version.
With Epic40k I think GW were trying to revitalise the system by giving it a radical overhaul/streamline in a similar manner to what they did with 40kV3 and it didn't appeal to many people for the reasons you point out. Our group found it to be too radical a change, we didn't particularly like the mechanics and it didn't take the game where a lot of us wanted the game to go.
The models from that era are absolutely superb though, easily the best GW ever produced imo (I do still rate, and own, a lot of the first edition models).
Epic Armageddon finally finds a happy medium for a lot of people. The game doesn't play as quickly as third edition, has less detail than first edition and has less cinema centric character moments than second edition, but at the same time it plays quick enough to be fluid, has enough detail to clearly be from the 40K background (and in many ways reflects the 40K background betted than 40K itself) and has epic moments when formations clash in battle.
Spot on.
I guess on the bright side there are four official different versions of the game out there and we can still play whichever version we like.
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