War With A Mate - Episode 15: Digging In

Episode Date: March 14, 2025

What’s better than talking about things completely unrelated to the game you ask? Talking about things that ARE related of course! You asked, they listened. This week the guys focus in amidst an admin heavy play session and instead address some listener questions about the game, some historical background on Italian leadership during the campaign and then burrow into an Andrew-led common ground, all in this bumper sized episode.

hello and welcome to war with a mate yeah that's us i'm uh i'm james i'm andy forgot for a moment there lost myself a little bit and all the carnage has there been a lot of carnage there hasn't been a lot of carnage it's been a lot of bootkeeping it has and because we say that a lot and we're going to stop talking about bootkeeper we're going to we're going to be doing some segments trying them out we are we're going to be doing something a little bit different today a bit of a fresh perspective on things because we found that when we don't have anything to talk about we'll talk about things completely unrelated so we thought we'd treat you today that's right a little a little special little brucey bonus we're going to talk about some

things related to the game but not specifically the game because we have a lot of admin stuff it's all spreadsheets today it's all assigning resources to different places you know the score so because it's happening but it's just not exciting to talk about exactly because the progress is just how many pieces of data we filled in on a spreadsheet we're gonna mix it up a little bit now for the uninitiated and i don't think there's many of you you know the score what we're doing here is playing spi's the campaign for north africa start to finish we are currently in the throes of a test playthrough of a little scenario the italian offensive but today we're going to be talking a little bit about some other aspects of the game the historical background

of the conflict itself and a few other little bits and pieces here and there yeah decided to mix it up because we've had some we've had some feedback actually we've we've put the the feelers out there we've asked those people listening that's you what it is that you like what it is you don't like and what it is we could do that little bit better and everybody turned around and said there's nothing you can do better everything is perfect but we looked inwards we looked inwards and a little bit outwards towards some of we actually we read between the lines because what everyone was saying everything is perfect what we were hearing is everything is perfect but you should talk a little bit more about the game because we've been

listening to your podcast and you don't talk exclusively about the game a lot of it is unrelated nonsense that's what i got from the subtext what did you get from the subtext i mean it was pretty much that uh yeah so it's more just staying focused i think so yeah should we get into the first uh piece of correspondence so when it comes to the yeah when it comes to this this feedback we do appreciate the feedback it's been fantastic it's been a good opportunity to hear what you like and what you don't like and we're very gracious that you've decided to grace us with such feedback so we're gonna we're gonna give back to the people we've decided we've we've taken enough we've taken the board game from a board game collector i imagine we've taken your

precious time listening to this and what we're going to do is give back because oh do you hear that that sound of a telegram coming through andy do you hear it i like the sound effect yeah yeah i'm sure it's been put in post and i'm sure it sounds really good or i've not found anything and people are just reaffirming that we are developing some sort of mania while playing this but it would seem we've actually had a real life email from a real life listener very exciting Some real correspondence. And we're going to address that in our very first mail call. And that's how we're going to open up today. Today's all business. It's all good stuff. It's all important talk. And we're going to open up with our very first piece of correspondence. And it's sent in from our listener, Alexander. so the email goes hi my name is alexander for those confused i'm still james this is me from now on until i let you know this is me reading an email this isn't my stream of consciousness

to let them know and they're gonna think the email's 40 minutes they're gonna think the email is 40 minutes and that it's going to include common ground and a lot of nonsense about our real lives um this man's clairvoyant so back to it hi my name is alexander and i saw your post on reddit two days ago if anyone else hasn't then by all means check that out i listened to the 13 episodes and i must admit i had a really good time well thank you so did we so not so no not all the listeners are bots and hopefully that reddit post boosted your audience by like five which means you now have five people listening to this podcast and knowing if you guys finish yeah one of them is definitely real and knowing if you guys finish this game or not

we'll come for you if you don't we we were hoping that is the case but now that we've had a measured threat it makes us feel that little bit more motivated to stay on track so thank you the meal is a carrot the revenge of the listeners is a stick yeah now we've got both carrot and stick so thank you for sending in your carrot but that's not where it ends by the way um and uh and thank you for the stick i'm personally a war game enthusiast although not a hardcore one like not to the point where i would even dare to play this game just to reiterate alexander we're also not hardcore uh war gamers we are people with spare time and a microphone decision making that's all we've got um but i still enjoy the podcast well that's that's good thank you um i think it was

an episode 12 where you guys talk quite a lot about the game compared to the other episodes and it was good took us long enough of course i like the other episodes too because if i was only here for the game i would have dropped at the second episode and there really is the crux isn't it andy that was incredibly fair we have correct yeah we were we were sort of waiting for it but now we've had that validated it's it's time to it's time to act on it he continues so i do have a question about the game at what level of detail does the game represent vehicles and especially tanks is each individual tank a little line on the spreadsheet or is it more broad and each unit just has a number that represents them well we'll definitely get into that um that is a it's an

actual question and it's one that allows us to get to the rule so we'll come back to that that's great because if the game is so detailed i would like to know if there is a precise list of vehicles for each unit for example the tiger one tanks are quite special same goes for the eight question mark Churchill tanks that the British had at El Alamein although this possibly is a question for a few years from now well we've we've got some answers for you and also a few very special vehicles the Rommel funnies are prototypes that have been sent to the Africa Corps during the war they didn't have any impact on the actual campaign but since the game is so detailed maybe they're included in some sort of way and what you've got to bear in mind Alexander is that

this is also an alternative history where we are the generals so they may well have an impact second question also more about the tanks and maybe other vehicles but tanks seem to be the most plausible to have dedicated rules and details added to them can you do field modifications or does the repair take into account which part is needed or stuff like that i mean that would be a horrendous level of detail to play and considering the time it would require but the game does not seem to care about things such as having a social life and mental sanity so maybe the designers went that far oh yes they did yes they did another point we will come back to you i assure you of that you pegged them perfectly and he goes on i thought a lot about the dead

camels me too man me too for two days my brain has been filled with dead camels see a doctor and huel how hard it must be to live in the uk nowadays considering people are ready to jewel for close to a decade for a meal a little bit of political commentary we promised we'd stay away from that alexander you've kind of broken the rule but all right fair enough as as someone's sending in the information this isn't from my perspective this is from it's from an email i'm allowed to be political via an email i will live vicariously through you fast forward 10 years fighting through the ruins of cities and the meals genuinely important the meals are i mean we're doing this for a meal for like a life yeah we're doing this for a meal now i know so there

we go so i thought about different things camels have a lot of fat so maybe you could take the dead camel somewhere and burn them to create smoke to trick the enemy or maybe you could bombard the allied forces with dead camels you set on fire while on the plane i'm sure the rules don't take that into account the level of detail is at such a low level that the game is literally unplayable well now you're just being facetious that is to be fair the game is to an extent unplayable but that's mostly because of the the opposite however i do think it is the case the rules don't take that into account because everything else is so well thought out that we may well have just missed that that might be in there we're yet to find out i do like the idea of using the dead

camels for tricks setting fire to them it feels like it's in bad taste especially when we've described this as a war without hate yeah but i don't know if you can really call that hate that sounds more like a tactical decision i also think when we finish this and we're the world's foremost expert on the games yeah yeah we should do a patch for what the camel rules end up being i agree so we have the authority this is the the leader for how the camel rules will be implemented so far so good if anyone's got an alternative by all means put it through but right now you're the front runner alexander i believe that this is maybe what the camels are used for i mean that's very demoralizing to just have a burning camel land in your foxhole i'd be hard i would leave i'd be

yeah i'd be going over the trench well a bit more world war one but maybe i shouldn't keep going on the camel thing alexander continues i wouldn't want to be arrested because i said the italians could have won the war by bombarding the allies with burning camels well you have it's what you've said and um we do have is that his ip address here is that let me just send it over to the italian bureau of investigations the the ibi no that's that's something we talk about a lot more than you they'll focus on us don't worry they'll go for the the ringleaders uh so continues i'm not qualified to criticize whatever you guys do i'm only sharing ideas i have you absolutely are qualified everyone is qualified if you're

listening to this you're qualified to criticize or give feedback so don't you worry about that we're not qualified to talk about this we just have microphones yeah maybe you could set some sort of diagram on your website with the different unit levels like divisions then brigade and battalion etc so you wouldn't have to say exactly what it is all the time and you could just go on talking about the units agreed agreed fantastic idea yeah and that is something we've waxed about for a while and the fact that someone has put it in writing and sent it over we agree and we do think that is something we'll be doing sometime in the future we need to make sure we definitely understand it correctly because at the moment we're confident that we do we'll make we'll make

double sure we'll triple check and when we've quadruple confirmed we'll stick something out there we will do that for everyone listening so brilliant suggestion thank you for that and also you could take a picture of the entire board at the start or end of each turn or maybe more than one picture the ceiling isn't far enough so you can get a top-down view of the entire map no you're right you're right so at the end you'll be able to make a stop-motion version of the game i think a time lapse would actually be very cool to see and also you could post each picture turn on the website so people have an idea about how the game is going agreed we will be doing that i don't think the picture itself will do justice as to how the game is going but hopefully the

episodes additional information we'll do but we will be putting out a picture every operational stage or five pictures rather one for each map anytime people anytime there's a bit in the game where you move things around the map yes we'll do all the moving and take a picture put it up so you'll be able to see from a high level how things are going absolutely so soon we should have a picture up of all of the current maps for the very start of the game so that's everything that's out there when the this is again the practice run everything that's out there as the practice run starts you can see how the game looks um any any questions you've got about how the units break down by all means ask the rules are online if you want to double check anything there

you're more than welcome to fire off a question about that so goes on to finally say anyway this is quite a long email quite all right first one you're this is this is your airtime my friend very welcome to it please keep going guys what you're doing is great and brave you're kind of like heroes really at least for the allies yeah that's that's fair i don't think i'm allowed to call myself a hero so that's i'll take that but i know that deep down you mean that i am too you just can't put that in writing again i don't want the police at my doorstep yeah yeah and although i don't get all the jokes because i didn't reach my mid-40s identity crisis get it 1940s yep no that's no it's good comedy we also don't tell any jokes on here this is all deadpan nervous laugh

everything is deadpan it's not it's not a joke what we're doing by playing such a game but i will certainly do that when the time comes so we're not in the same decade of joke material but i still have a great time listening to your podcast love from france or rather hope i think you need more hope than love right now i think he's he's nailed that you're spot on with that alexander and thank you very much for our first email it provides some some levity to the situation that's good because we are just so deadpan with all this so far that a bit of levity was was much needed and as well as that some actual questions which mean we have not just an excuse but a real demand to get into some of the rules here so that is fantastic so thank you for that email and i

think now we'll go back we'll touch on some of these questions yeah so shall we first one uh what level of detail does the game represent vehicles and especially tanks absolutely so do you want to you want to pick up with that then andy uh yeah um the vehicle use not the vehicle uh the game uses something called toe points um i don't think we've found what the acronym is actually for in the rules anywhere well as you might recall i did find it i can't find it again it does say at some point in the rules what it's a toe is toe it's always capitalized it does stand for something and it mentions it i think once in a throwaway line in the rules and it says something along the lines of this is what it stands for but don't worry about that so it is out there and we

will troll through at some point and find that so i promise that is out there we'll we'll get back to you with a definition at some point yeah but basically the strength of each unit is toe points and they a toe point of infantry is meant to be the equivalent of approximately 100 men yes a toe point of armored vehicles including tanks is five to eight and then for guns like artillery and stuff like that it's four to eight so it abstracts the unit numbers down a toe point which is basically like the smallest operational unit of whatever that is they can like affect things exactly yes yeah that's a good way to put it yeah so the the toe point is yeah it's your smallest form of functional unit you can't have sort of 12 guys be effective in this scenario

so when you're playing the game yeah your toe point is well yeah as you put it those sort of quantities of units and if they ever fall below that it's sort of abstracted so you never really see what would happen beyond that if they get smaller at that point it's just quashed and the group is non-functional yeah so that means dead or taken prisoner exactly yeah so it breaks apart into prisoners into broken down vehicles so if you've got say like three tanks or three armored vehicles it doesn't really allow you to have them represented on the game in any way shape or form but it does give you specific information about what that tool point looks like yeah so a tool point of panzer tanks for example we don't have any panzer tanks on the board and we won't for

years the way this is going but a toe point of panzers is going to be a lot more effective than say a toe point of 100 infantry men when it comes to fighting other tanks for example because each toe point depending on what it's a toe point of has different values for anti-armor anti-air uh barrage so these two points a two point is yeah the sort of the the meat of you have a unit of you have a two point of and when you're doing like combat you'll often times the two points by like the attack ratings yes and like typically a lot of my armored stuff i've noticed have up to 10 tow points so i guess that'll be 50 to 80 tanks yeah yeah with whatever that unit is exactly so you've got all of these breakdowns of tow points a tow point being the the smallest significant

element of a group and then those groups have their own characteristics so because of that yes there is quite a granular breakdown of the types of vehicles because you've got your tow points but you've got your two points of very specific types of vehicles i'm just going to grab my my sheets here so if i was to flick open the access book and i was to look at some of the gun characteristics so there's a chart here i'll show you in the microphone if you can see that there you go yeah not a video podcast so that's kind of useless so we have the charts here of i mean at a glance it's sort of 20 to 30 different types of tanks and guns so you've got panzer this is just for germans so you've got panzer one panzer two panzer three e panzer three h panzer three j

it goes on and each of them have a different cpa your capability point allowance that determines how much they can move it determines other things like attack retreat basically if a unit's doing anything it's spending cpa exactly cpa is everything infantry trucks it's like a base system they all use yes everything that can move or use something it expands cpa and it replenishes each operation stage that's sort of your your tank that you can deplete during that and it replenishes so the panzer one panzer two they've all got different ratings for anti-armor barrage anti-armor vulnerability armor protection offensive and defensive close assault and then also their fuel rating so there's a lot of granular detail in the vehicles so each of them in a sense is a

line on a spreadsheet which consists of a toe point and then they all have those characteristics a lot of which are static those ones that i've just rattled off there they won't change they will be the same but yeah that's a bit of a breakdown as to how those vehicles work anything you want to add about the tool points or anything like that no it's I think that's

it it's just yeah not to think of things as like individual individual tanks everything's like a group with the scale of this I think tracking individual tanks is beyond even the scope of this game in like silly

craziness i think only because they ran on a budget or time i think if they'd had computers back then they would have done they would have done it it's thankfully there's a technological limitation on how much maths they were willing to do the only thing that stopped them was how much computing technology they had so another point that you've you've asked there um sort of tied into the same question is um the tiger one tanks are quite special and same goes for the churchill tanks so the tiger one tanks i've had a look through and the tiger one tanks aren't featured in this i did a little skip forward for the the german forces and i don't seem to get them and seems to be the case that they come into action tunisia which seems to be the back end of

of the north african campaign after the allies sort of mop up like the libya region they move into tunisia so it's part of the africa campaign but it's not part of the this game exactly so it doesn't really it doesn't play into here and there's so much stuff that is pulled in through such small level of detail i'm surprised they weren't even put in there as a sort of little post-credit scene nudge nudge wink wink oh the last turn here's one of the tigers yeah you won't get to use them but we've included them anyway which they've done with a couple of planes and stuff so yeah wouldn't shock me yeah so they haven't got those in but very valid question um as was the question about the churchill tanks and you have a bit of an answer about that yeah

i've uh because there's eight of them it's one toe point exactly yeah so on turn 90 and only turn 90 that's right i can spend replacement points which are like an abstract point that can be applied to infantry armor too i can spend that to get one toe point of the churchill tanks um yeah only on turn 90 so a long way away if i miss it on turn 90 i'm not getting them and that is roughly 90 months into the game yeah so that's a long way away and he gets he gets one shot at bringing those churchills in so that is around the the battle of lma main from what we can decipher from what the game translates based on just movement that it's be like 92 93 if they sort of arrive and head straight to el alamein yeah and there may well not be a battle of el alamein

involved in all of this i'm very interested to see if just the like geography and the units we have mean we end up sort of having similar i don't think it will points and hold points or whether it's it becomes the battle of like city bujani where like a hundred thousand people die and people just walk through ll i mean no what's going to happen is you're going to um get me and essentially spawn kill me i think at marble arch is what's going to happen i'm going to just get swept over it turn like 12 and that'll be me done is the way i see this going but that yeah bit of information there about your tanks and the the second question which he said was also about the tanks but also applies to some other vehicles oh just before that yeah the rommel funnies

yes yes they don't seem to be in the game no no they were um so i i do have a little bit of um clarity on the rommel funnies we we didn't know what these were by the way and when we looked into them it wasn't immediately apparent but the rommel funnies from what we've been able to determine they're essentially these sort of frankenstein creations that rommel had put together i don't think he personally built them don't think he's got the acumen to put them together by hand some of the pictures it does kind of have the like vibe of put that gun on that tank but sir we we don't have the means to do that i said put the gun on the tank and then he walks away and comes back later with perfect that's exactly what i want ridiculous thing so it looks

like somebody essentially said i want to put an artillery gun onto some tracks and somebody said is that a good idea sir anyway well sorry what's what's what's my am i my rommel all right all right yeah that's that's fine sir and they did just that they stuck these artillery weapons onto some tracks by the looks of it and there is actually mention of one in my um sort of roster of guns and it's the it's abbreviated as the pz jg1 brackets sp4 asterisks and it the asterisks correlate to a little point later on that says it is a german panzer one tank chassis with the czech 47 millimeter gun mounted so we had a look we found some pictures of that i can't find where i can actually use that in the game so i think that's an example of it mentioned but doesn't

actually practically play into it but it's essentially this artillery weapon stuck on some tracks that can then plow through the sand so it's a a strange cobbled together mess so the rommel funnies do seem to be mostly that i can't find any other examples of it but yes it does seem like these prototypes are in the game don't know if i ever get to play with them don't know if they will affect the outcome of the war but hey we'll we'll find out i suppose yeah so again interesting to see how that plays out and you've also then went on to ask again about the vehicles in a broader sense can you field modify tanks can you do anything out in the field you can you can and it does abstract it to an extent because as you've mentioned the game is very detailed but it does

give us a bit of a saving grace so there's two ways it approaches it you've got broken down vehicles which is where the breakdown rating of a vehicle depending on the terrain it's went through just stops it and it breaks down sand and everything clogs it up that's from movement it is it's from movement it's from wear and tear essentially and if you're going through what is or basically if you go through bad terrain the brake rating gets higher. Exactly it adds up it adds up and stacks every op stage

and then you do a roll at the end of each op stage to determine if that vehicle breaks down and yes you do have to do that for every single thing that is motorised. Every tow point of trucks of tanks, guns guns, anything that moves around and is motorised you have to see if it breaks

down. That also includes trucks for the logistical layer. All the All the trucks and convoys that are moving all of your stuff around. So these trucks, everything, they can break down. And if they break down, they can be repaired out in the field. Repairing them, it requires a bit of fuel. So one point of fuel. You can repair them and then get them back up and running.

They don't need to be yours. You can repair the other teams. It doesn't matter what nationality they are. You can repair someone else's stuff. It's yours. you get you get it to work as it is it doesn't sort of magically switch um which some games i imagine would do it actually maintains all of its characteristics so you fix a panzer you get a panzer yes i fix a churchill i get a churchill it works slightly differently though if it's

destroyed yes uh then you have to take it to a repair facility yeah uh so towing things as part of this game and not to be confused with two points to wing as in to traditionally tow something yeah so if your vehicle breaks down you put a vehicle breakdown marker like on the map and then same as uh breakdowns you can repair the other person's stuff if you take it and that requires some stores and some fuel and you have to take them to a facility yes which could be a very long away away depending on where that happens although we do i get free i can't remember mobile field repair things basically they act as repair things but they move yes and you get one i think i get one and i don't get it for a while yes i think mine's german yes so i don't

get it for a long time i also i think it can't repair italian stuff whether that's a technical limitation of the squad or the germans going i'm not wasting time fixing an italian these terrible pieces of equipment so yeah it does it does abstract it slightly thankfully but when it comes to field repairs it is possible the the alternative is if we lose a so say you've got a battalion with five toe points of panzers so that's say 40 panzer tanks and you lose a toe point through battle or attrition or breakdown what you can then do is train a replacement point or ship one over from sicily it would be for me and then you can have that replacement point travel down to meet that unit and it sort of stocks back up that toe point yeah you essentially

have some fresh tanks and then you couldn't then repair the other one to go above your limit there are limits on each unit of how many tow strength they can max out on. So you can't fill one battalion with like a hundred tanks, a hundred tow points. Interesting thing I will have to check though is whether or not that would affect if you can repair it.

Because I'm not sure if that's how many can be in the desert itself or how many in the game. It's the unit, it's like how capable of commanding they are. Oh sorry for the specific group, yes. So it's not like physically limited like this X amount of panzers are allowed ever. It's more

yeah as and when you come across them uh you can repair them and steal them but yes that's that that's i think covers off those questions and uh the feedback that you've mentioned very valid and thank you very much something we'll be acting on so thank you very much for that alexander that is that is brilliant and anyone else who has any questions feel free to fire them over correspondence ticked off what a little bit of correspondence that was yeah cool from this cool from the send it over like a telegram as well with that cool sound effect he's getting into the the theme yeah yeah everyone knows to send it over the sound effect obviously otherwise how will we know that it's coming through i wonder if you can still get telegrams you like can you still

can i like is that a service you can still get we should try like can i send a telegram to like a western union for someone to like pick up we should set up a telegram if possible then people can get in touch with us via telegram yeah we only receive correspondence from forms of communication that were like active at the time we'll take pigeon oh yeah i'll absolutely take a pigeon if a pigeon delivers a message that's amazing if a pigeon delivers the message we'll send you the game via pigeon piece by piece it will take a long time but you will get it and it will be, I imagine, just absolutely riddled with bird shit. And pigeons, I don't know what they eat, but it comes out nasty.

Well, that's why I wanted cats to kill them. Yeah, but I think that's a load as well. I think you've got other motivation, and I'm not entirely sure what the motivation is, but you've got suspicious plans. I mean, always. I don't trust you at all. part of why i'm doing this with you for the next eight years it's to keep your enemies close

exactly i need to keep an eye on you at all times i need to keep you busy with magnets and stuff magnets are coming along great by the way yeah they're all done everything is working i've got the board right next to me here all of the the maps are stacked up right behind me and everything's everything's vertical and it's still standing up yeah i was expecting them to slowly slide over the week but no it seems we've just got a solution everything's just working perfectly it's all it's all going great it's all going fantastic so uh do you want me to ruin your mood oh what a beautiful promise you've presented here uh i'd be remiss to say no so by all means ruin my day yeah i've uh i prepared a little dossier on uh graziani who this offensive is

named after right my my guy i do not like this man oh this is heavens a shockingly bad man and I'm surprised we've not learned about it. So this is Graziani, the figurehead of the offensive that we're playing the mini scenario for. So this is the guy in charge of the Italian forces during this first segment of the campaign. Yes, this is Rodolfo Graziani, the hyena of Tripoli, the butcher of Libya, the butcher of Arabs,

the butcher of Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, and also the Butcher of Ethiopia. Sorry, so this man has Butcher in... Is that four of his nicknames? Yes. He has two Butchers that are city-specific, two that are countries, and one that's an ethnic group.

Brilliant. That's what you want to hear from a leader, a general. Yeah, here's a fun quote, a tone about the man. fun quote okay yeah you've promised fun so let's see what that manifests as an enemy forgiven is more dangerous than a thousand foes just to give you a guy this guy's arch is quite mean-spirited yeah right okay so this is the man that i'm now um going to be living in the the perspective so his shoes whatever decision i make i need to be better than him i suppose both morally and logistically

because they lost historically. Spoilers. We're going to get to this, but this guy if you're worse than this guy morally Jesus Christ that's so bad. So he's born in 1882 in Valentiano, a small town

in Italy. Okay, okay. The fourth of nine brothers. His father's the village doctor. Okay. This is the 1880s though, so he's not like Hippocratic Oath. He's giving people, like, opium for coughs and stuff. I think germ theory's being invented,

but it won't be, like, your village doctors aware of it at this time. So we're a little bit better than drill a hole in the head for a headache. No, it's give them drugs that are now illegal for a headache. But that's better than drill a hole in the head. It's now you're tripping balls. Medicine is progressing. And you're on meth, maybe, but I guess better than a hole in the head. Okay, okay.

And he always wanted to go to the military. Okay. I just found this bit interesting As the child of a doctor That's interesting This is just something very interesting About the time I found He wanted to become

He wanted to go to military school But his father was too poor To support him going to military school So he went to university To become a lawyer Which is just like a weird flip of now Yeah His dad has one of the most prestigious jobs

and it was like you can't join the military go be a lawyer yeah that's a very strange thing if you yeah if i told you that now i was like oh yeah my my my my child wants to become uh someone serving in the military yeah i'm too poor i'm just i'm just a doctor i'm just a surgeon yeah you're gonna have to become a solicitor instead oh fine dad whatever yeah i'll not go to war i'll i guess all work in the courts that's a strange switch of dynamic yeah so he goes to law school where he joins the military reserves oh okay he's found a back door yeah um and three years later he gets called up to the military and passes this like uh officer's exam like 300 people take it like 30 pass he's like the top of his class this guy sucks but he seems to be smart and competent which is

why he's able to do all this horrible stuff historically the worst kind of bad person someone who's intelligent and uses that intelligence to do nasty things yeah yeah yeah um so he graduates that as a lieutenant and gets sent to italian eritrea okay which is italian occupied eritrea at the time which is just north of ethiopia right okay so he's always had his eyes set on africa this guy thrives on doing bad things in africa brilliant brilliant uh while he's there he contracts malaria okay learns arabic and tigriani the local language well on the upside he's uh his dad's a doctor so the malaria thing you'll be fine with and he's also uh practicing solicitor by the sounds of it so different languages that sounds like it's going to help

yeah this is and what in 1911 he's been there for like two three years okay he gets bitten by a snake and almost dies so this man is already suffering mythological ailments from greek mythology this guy has malaria and a snake bite that made him miss the italia turkish war which lasted a year oh convenient you just missed the whole thing oh but he does then get transferred to northern italy where they're fighting the austro-hungarians and the germans this is all like colonial pre-war world war one world war one time yeah yeah uh there he gets wounded twice one of them is gas he survives both so this man i mean i'll credit to him he survived a lot of dangerous situations surviving things he shouldn't is a theme in this man's life

so snake bite i suppose it depends on the snake gas he was incapacitated for a year so it's a bad snake bite world war one era gas as well you're looking at sort of yeah mustard gas yeah it's not the sort of thing that doesn't leave permanent disfigurement of the internal organs this guy yeah uh but he does excel uh he gets several uh cited for martial skill and bravery oh dear and he leaves this conflict as the youngest colonel in the italian royal army right okay he's 36 this is a mixture of he's good at war to a certain extent and everyone above him's dying because this is world war one yeah it's sort of all the officers are dying and he's fairly good so he's coming up he's shooting right up to the top but that gets uh yeah when the conflict ends he comes

back to italy and he's expecting to just shoot up the ranks now like the sky's the limit but it's between world war one and world war two so the communist party want to assassinate him i right i don't know what you're about to say but i have a funny suspicion that it's going to be the case that there's an assassination attempt and he survives it's sillier is it a second snake he comes back home and he leaves the army temporarily uh so he's less of a target okay and he travels to palmer famous for his ham right and sets up a business importing far eastern goods i never found any more details of what that was but the business fails well yeah because he's got such a broad market yeah it's

Just Far Eastern goods. That could be anything Far Eastern. Yeah. So the business fails, and as you do at this time if you're a failure, he joins the fascist party. Ooh, a very pointed remark about the fascists. Yeah, I don't think I've hidden my disdain. Good.

Yeah. So he joins the fascists fairly early. They haven't taken over Italy at this point. It's still a kingdom, but they're like a massive political movement. Yeah, yeah. The fascists take over. I think 1922, maybe? Sounds right from my preliminary knowledge.

Maybe around there, yeah. Yeah, 1922, October 29th. That's the March on Rome, and the king sort of makes Mussolini the dictator. Yeah. So he doesn't get killed, basically. And then, so this is where things get awful. They were already quite bad.

He gets sent back to Africa now, but this time he's as the viceroy of an area called Cyrenia We've never been good with the pronunciations but we will get there and if anyone knows how it's pronounced please correct us. It's sort of basically

the eastern half of modern day Libya. Okay which is a lot of where this takes place Yes. So this is starting to add up. Yeah and this is sort of 14 years, 12 years before so he's this is the colonial era this was a stomping ground a long time before the north african campaign yes uh so he arrives in libya and this is the start of something called the

libyan genocide brilliant which that's always a little suffix you want yeah and this is i'm shocked i didn't know about this beforehand as i was reading it this is crazy so he arrives he He carries out the forced migration and deportation of an entire region called Jebel al-Qadar, which is the Green Mountains. It's like a very, like, lush, mountainous region at the north. Okay. He deports 100,000 Bedouins, which is half the population of the region. Okay, so he's Thanos-ed half of the region. he's got he's got them i think they would have liked to get snapped because what ends up happening

is the hundred thousand people which is mostly men women and children because the men are rebel fighting they're in camps in the desert and stuff sorry you said men women and children oh sorry uh women children and the elderly oh sorry from what i thought you meant which is mostly everyone i was like all right so all of the most of the men from what i could tell are out sort of in camps in the desert doing a guerrilla resistance but it's like home he marches them 154 kilometers through the desert anyone who falls behind gets killed great great yeah and they end up in concentration camps around benghazi okay right yeah i see how this is starting to put together where my forces are during the game in that case yeah um during this time the italian air force is performing gas

attacks on the rebels in the desert stellar work that's uh yeah just war crimes then yeah and they're persecuting the local senesi order who is like local religious and political power they're sort of both oh cool destabilizing both political and um religious why he's in the mosques forbids religious practices, confiscates lands and on February 20th 1931, so like a year

later, he destroys their last stronghold the Kufra Oasis and they perform a bombing and strafing campaign on innocents fleeing into the desert. So it's 1931, half the population

of this region is confined to 16 concentration camps right so this man has he's waltzed in he's decided that after surviving so many close brushes with death yeah best thing to do with his time with his military acumen is to go into this region that he's sort of made his own the italians have taken this region because they've got the idea of rebuilding the roman empire as it were yes they're like reaching back to the glory days so they sort of view the entire mediterranean as their right to rule which from what i know and this this goes back to the the guys that we had on in episode three the uh

the guys from the pacific war channel echoes of war what i'd found when i was listening to their podcast is that mussolini's whole approach was rebuild the roman empire yeah and that sort of cursed mindset is what ended up with the failed campaign for north africa yeah so yeah this is all coming together this guy graziani sounds like he definitely shared a lot of that belief he was a die-hard fascist he loved fascism sounds like it yeah he was an early joiner of the party and one of its prominent members the entire time a day one yeah uh these these concentration camps in libya the germans start visiting them in particular two notables himmler and goering oh two of the lovely ones then

Goering who went on to help design and run the first concentration camp and Himmler the head of the SS and the architect of the final solution go to these concentration camps in Libya to like take

notes and are very impressed oh brilliant so this was the progenitor for this is part of the inspiration for what happened they're going you've killed this like population you don't want in your country how have you done it let's take notes so so graziani what was his first name again sorry rodolfo so good old rodolfo hang on that's just adolf yeah i think with uh with history it's the same etymology yeah so rodolfo is right okay i see

what's happened here so this guy has essentially become the inspiration for the holocaust yeah he's one of them where they're like how do we do this like as a practical so survives world war one era combat yeah is scorned because he couldn't follow the profession that he originally wanted to yeah and then shows up in a different nation and then chastise them because of a fall from grace of a previous empire and wants to restore that empire yeah creates concentration camps and besets terror on minorities and tries to undermine political religious and social powers yes so yes i can see why himla was like oh let me take note of that so if anything this guy among other things inspired the concentration camps wow real piece of you know what this is gonna i know we've done

a tongue-in-cheek before the whole oh i can't uh can't possibly you know advocate for my side because they're evil this is going to make that a lot more sincere because it really measures how awful this guy is you're right you have actually ruined my day a little bit that's horrible after his success here mussolini goes love this go to ethiopia we want to handle that the same way and this is a they call by the way they call mussolini the juice the juice uh it's a like combination of ducks which was like a Roman title and Duke to be like

the juice, they like made a new title for him okay this is a quote from Graziani as he's heading to Ethiopia the juice will have Ethiopia with or without the Ethiopians my god

yeah so him and another guy show up in Ethiopia, like pincering it the other guy is much more successful like he takes the capital he gets a lot more of the praise but he's still promoted to the Marshal of Italy at this point

after they subjugate Ethiopia and they're doing all of the same stuff, there's concentration camps there's killings it's the same so during this point he gets a tour

of an Ethiopian Orthodox church and at this point he falls into a pit covered by an ornate carpet a trap he believes set by the priests but miraculously survives so this is another near-death experience where he's fallen down a hole like covered in a rug so this piece of cartoon so this piece of dirt is surviving indiana jones style hijinks yes and then going on to be an indiana jones villain yes and this guy at this point there's five instances where he should have died for the sake of the world and also just the odds like he's been gassed he's been shot you know what this is one of those horrible things where you take it into context and you just think about the domino effect of

history that if this guy died you know what maybe it's early on in childhood and he gets some sort of ailment and his doctor father is trying some sort of early uh well i guess late 1800s surgery and he just dies yeah and the inspiration for the concentration camps as we knew them in the holocaust may not manifest yeah like that domino or if that snake was just a little bit better yeah of being a snake then so much so much suffering might have been averted in the way it happened would have happened because it's like an outcome of the regime but also like the implementation and like hundreds of thousands of people wouldn't have happened so he falls through the carpet in a church but somehow survives and then later on he's having this they're having this

like we won like ceremony on stage in the capital of ethiopia um two uh ethiopians uh well eritreans who moved to ethiopia and then didn't get the opportunities and are against the like occupation they approach the stage during this they throw 10 grenades at him he has 365 fragments in his body okay he is taken to hospital where he miraculously survives so he's also got iron man's origin story yes this guy won't fucking die because hell is like we don't want you you're too evil i don't know what's going on well i mean if the adage if the adage the good die young is true i guess yeah then this guy i take it he lived to be 170 because he's a real piece of shit we'll get he lived longer than he showed up so he gets blown up his second in

command is this guy called guido cortez on stage immediately he just pulls out a gun and starts shooting the ethiopian dignitaries on stage with him who aren't involved in the attack oh fucking hell graziani's in hospital and he gives uh and cortez gives this order uh comrades today is the day we show our devotion to our viceroy by reacting and destroying the ethiopians for three days for three days i give you carp lunch to destroy and kill and do what you want with the ethiopians so it's just a three-day like it's the purge frenzy of italian troops like it's the purge But one side's an army, and one side are civilians. Yeah, and there's various numbers,

but Ethiopian sources, who I'm more inclined to believe, then the other sources are like French and English news reporters. So historically, it might be slightly watered down. But they're covering up a bunch of their own colonial crimes, so I think a lot of them don't. But the Ethiopians estimate 30,000 people are killed in the next three days. God. Modern analysis suggests it's 19,200, which is 20% of the population.

Oh, Jesus. Yeah. Over three days? Yes. And also, a lot of people who aren't killed are sent off to more concentration camps. Yeah. I think, well... Just one more...

Okay. I'll get up to World War II there's a bit more and then we'll stop with him okay because this is just horrible information to dump you know the holy fell through yeah well that gave him a lifelong suspicion of the

Ethiopian Orthodox clergy which helped convince him because of tangential evidence that the monks were complicit in the attack on him okay so he gives the order I therefore execute summarily

all monks without distinction including the vice priori on the feast day of this religion they go in and kill one and a half thousand to two thousand people at this for these actions he gains the title the butcher of Ethiopia

and Mussolini is very impressed and pulls him back to Europe in June for the start of the 1940 for the start of the second world war so we'll run it up to there for his pre-world war 2 life but this guy is such a big piece of shit you know what the thing is when you said i'm going to ruin your day i expected some like deplorable stuff because you know a fascist leader during

this period what does really shock me though is the level of deplority but also the fact that this conflict was coined the war without hate and the fact that this guy was a figurehead in that conflict and the north african campaign is considered one of the gentler aspects of world war ii and this guy was fucking wandering around in charge if this guy is being successful thank god this guy lost beat him in operation compass it would have been i mean yeah it doesn't yeah doesn't really bear thinking about what that would have looked like if he managed to take a stronghold in North

Africa during that period. That's insane. He loves war crimes and subjugating populations, and he won't die. Like, falling through holes, 365 grenade fragments in

him from a grenade that went off next to him. Just walks it off. Well, it goes to hospital, but yeah. Like, he just won't die, and yeah this is the guy the italians put in charge of uh their operations uh in north africa at the start of world war ii if you want a smart brutal leader you've got one but fuck me that is that is deplorable yeah that is absolutely horrible but well thank you i mean it's it's well researched

so nicely done uh it's some some real history i did not expect to get today and kind of sorry that i did but i mean it gives some real interesting context on who it is that i'm sitting in the shoes of yeah because i thought i'd do a bit of research on it but then just the more i read i was like and there's some horrific quotes i left out there for time uh well i'm sure we can get into that at some point because we'll have so many more episodes that we record which are going to be on the back of a lot of admin heavy stuff like today and we'll we'll keep on filling in these days where this is the case with stuff like this

because ultimately us talking about the fact that we've done nothing, we've already done that like ten times. I think filling it in with something a bit more meaningful probably worthwhile, even if it does mean learning about something pretty horrible. But hey, we may as well

give some context to what we're doing here. It's a board game but god, some horrible stuff happened behind the real stuff. But I guess, yeah thanks for that and we'll get on to something different what a what a nasty man yeah not you not you well actually that's yet to be seen yeah maybe in the game things will i mean they can't get worse than that but maybe from my personal perspective in the realms of a board game maybe you'll be worse i hope you're the

worst one in the board game i mean yeah i don't want to be the worst one in the board game i feel like now i'm gonna play nice to overcompensate for the fact that i'm playing in the uh the role of such a nasty man. He just wouldn't die. His story doesn't get less infuriating. I'll tell you the rest of World War II and after next week. Well, I'll not look into him. I'll make sure that I get the information direct from you

so I can wax about how nasty it is here, because goodness me. But I suppose the only way we can get past this now is with a way to bridge the gap between nice and nasty and between you and I and maybe find some common ground. And now for something nicer. A little oasis in the wall.

It's time for some common ground. I'm trying to interrupt the common ground. I'm recording. Maybe. Yeah. So it's your common ground this week. So what have you brought for me that isn't something nasty

about the board game and history i think we should be doing way more stuff underground okay so when you say underground i'm taking that to mean you don't mean sort of uh indie culture not many people have heard of it you're talking about depth of yeah you're talking about burrowing in a lot of ways okay okay residentially in England I don't get why basements aren't a thing it's just an extra room

for free like land wise well you say for free I don't know what you mean by for free well it's the same footprint so you get an extra story but what about the pipes that's fine

the pipes and the tubes and the wires you just put them down put them further down yeah but then you need to that's a lot more wire and pipe yeah well homes have basements i think you think your home doesn't have a basement no i'd like it to so basements and then also just more underground i think intercity rail let's move that underground i mean intercity rail oh i'm sorry intercity no no we've

got yeah you've got sort of metros they tend to be underground yeah but yeah you don't get many in the city, underground. Okay, fair enough. Put them in a tunnel, make it like a rail gun. Super fast, and trees aren't going to fall on the tracks, so you can go really fast. Yeah, but the thing is, they like that. They like it when trees

fall. Oh, sorry, when trees fall on the tracks. That's air quotes in the air, by the way. When trees fall on the track, when leaves fall on the tracks, when there's a slight gust of wind, that's a way for them to shut off all of the trains. Yeah, which they can't do if it's deep underground.

Yeah, but they want to be able to do that. Yeah, so take the option away. Yeah, but they're the ones doing it. They're in charge. They're big train. Well, I'm pushing big train down underground. They've tried that before. Vertical farming under cities.

Vertical farming? Yeah, like hydroponic farming under cities. So you're going very ideological and very... Not ideological. I just think we should be moving more and more stuff underground so the surface can be really nice. That sounds very ideological. Like, you put the cars underground,

trains, all that stuff, factories, and then the surface... Sorry, factories shouldn't be underground. Depends on the type of factory. Well, what are your thoughts on mines? Because mines weren't safe. Putting a factory underground sounds like a bad idea. Well, you have...

Mines weren't safe because there weren't safety standards. I mean, it's partially that. mining is like inherently dangerous to a point but it's also like they will crawl into that coal filled hole with like a pickaxe yeah but also factories are already they're still quite dangerous at the moment factories more if somebody said you want to work in an office for a factory one of them is more dangerous i would go the factory is more dangerous and i'm i'm willing to bet and i haven't looked at the figures willing to bet i'm right i think if you take that underground it becomes an exponential increase in danger so you want to put factories underground

yeah as much as possible as going underground so rattle off some stuff so factories basements factories hydroponic farms yeah intercity rail right you know those like capsules like that with like the time capsule no it's like the pipes and you put the thing in it like and it goes off somewhere else. Oh, like the mail things. Yeah, that, but instead of that, your mailbox is connected to the pipes that are all underground.

You want the post to be underground. Yeah, so your post is just like a guy sending the thing, just throws it in the tube. Can we not just make that electronic? Can we not just do email? No. Why? Oh, you can email, but this will deliver stuff.

Oh, sorry, sorry. So you'll go on Amazon and you'll be like, I want a monitor, and then a pneumatic tube will deliver it. But what about the sky? Because they're doing that with drones and stuff. Yeah, I don't like that. I don't like drones everywhere.

Okay, so you're anti-drone, you're more about the underground thing. Yeah. But the thing is, the sky's already open. You just need to sort of plan, you need to schedule it is the only thing. Yeah. Whereas underground, you have to make room

because there's all the ground in the way. Yeah. So that sounds a lot more expensive and a lot more time-consuming. No, you're right, you're right. That is fair. but then but then you're bringing back mining which we've just talked about which is bad because there's going to be a whole era of mining coming you don't have to do like mining you can

use it you know they're like things they use to make the channel tunnel and like shake the tower in oceans 13 i imagine i haven't seen oceans 13 but i imagine like a big drill yeah so you're talking about it's kind of like fracking then isn't it no it's the opposite it's not the opposite of fracking the opposite of you know what i can't actually articulate what the opposite of fracking is but this is not the opposite of fracking because fracking involves shaking the earth and you've just said you want to shake the earth so it's not the opposite it's definitely close okay so i'm not giving you that i'm not i'm not not on board with it i just think you need to temper your expectations here because what we're talking about here is a lot of mining first and

foremost which we've established immediately as dangerous inherently and so with this this sort of first stage of clearing out the ground yeah you're gonna have to build equipment in the factories yeah which are on the surface for now for now yeah so that means a lot of surface factories are going to be getting a lot of work yeah and then you're going to have to get rid of all these workers afterwards no they just move they relocate underground well no the factory is actually closer because it's under the city rather than like on the outskirts so they go to like an entrance to the subterranean and they take like a lift down like a little a little trap trap door yeah but like fancy like fancy or describe to me the fancy trap door that they're

going through it's less of a trap door you walk up and it's like a big cylinder okay so it's very sci-fi yeah and you step into it and then it's just a lift sorry sorry sci-fi is not the word i'm looking for dystopian it's very dystopian so all of the working class people get into this tube and they go down into the ground for their shift and then they come up to the surface for the rest of the time and it's lovely and pristine there's no cars ruining everything sorry there's no cars they're all underground how deep is okay so it's in layers okay which also means if global warming continues to get worse we can retreat further and further underground like mole people so we're getting ahead of the curve we'll become morlocks no this is this so we're all going to be horrible

um vault dwellers from fallout the fallout game series is what we're doing yeah you're looking pensive i'm describing what you've told me i'm just telling you what it is well the vaults have some other stuff going on i don't want to be associated with oh that would never happen in the real world no corporations my underground mega country city in whose my yours i guess yeah that was a bit of a Freudian slip it was wasn't it yeah you're still on the cat train on you where you're in charge yeah i think most of my common grounds are going to be me presenting policy it sounds like you're you're the man in charge in all of these so okay okay i'm not inherently against it i just if you can to get me on board i'm gonna need what you said they're in layers

i'm gonna need the layers so we've got um drones in the sky this is dwindling i appreciate that yeah then you've got houses and this pristine environment on the surface yeah what's next what's the first layer basements basements okay yeah you you like basements yeah interhouse pneumatic tubes uh okay okay streets for cars and stuff like tunnels for cars streets for cars and stuff tunnels for cars and lorries and things okay so vehicles so the roads become the next layer yeah they're down so you've got tubes and then you've got cars yeah so at the moment you're describing how it works currently in with the drones drones are above the cars and lorries and then you've got the cars and lorries yeah what's below that factories factories okay yeah that could be

factories or farms oh great great you want them right next to each other well they're just in caverns next to each other i see yes the smoke and all of the um well you've been pollution vent that where where do you vent that to the pristine surface to the drones to the so the so the sky because bearing in mind as you said this is directly below the city so the city is going to be poisoned by all of the factories. We'll have some tunnels to take air away and we'll let it out.

You're going to... somewhere else. You're going to trap the cities in a border of toxins. Yeah. Right, okay. Which is fine, because the next layer, that's the deep roads. What? Into city transport. Okay, the deep roads.

That's, you know, your underground trains. Yeah, your... Underground autobahns. L-N-E-R Yeah Is that the bottom layer? And then it's like secret stuff Like the military and science

So they're right below How people move from city to city And you're not worried they're going to do anything nefarious with that No Like nab people or interfere And you don't think that there's any risk Of every single layer Above the deep roads

delaying travel I mean there's chances right now we're back at the same problem however however I am an advocate of trying something new I'll try anything once approved

I approve this we'll give it one go one go at moving on civilization underground you get to pick one city and we'll try it with that one if it works we'll see about some others if it doesn't fair enough we can write off one city so okay that's not too bad you didn't need

a pick i wasn't asking for the city okay um but it's an industrious city and it's mid-size it's it's quite big it's big enough that you can like work out the issues it's pretty massive but it's not like london it's yeah it's not london it's not the capital yeah you don't want to start with a couple no i agree but it's it's still huge right well it's it's a it's a bold play it's a bold play but i suppose we've got to start somewhere and and by the same merit andy we have to end somewhere and i believe let's end here we found we found some common ground we found out some horrible facts about history yes and before that you told me about graziani and we've also answered some some stellar questions presented and we're welcome welcoming some more so anyone

more questions file them over because when it comes to the admin heavy days and there will be admin heavy days aplenty as we get through this we'll need something to do so file them over your questions your quandaries your queries your concerns any interesting like individuals or like events yeah anything this time and yeah we can we can cover it the email address it's info at war with a mate.co.uk and it works the email address works we know that for a fact now and you're listening we're listening we're speaking and right now we're saying fare thee well good night stay subtle humble and brave and stay next week stay out of those tunnels because we don't know what andy's got going on but there's secrets down there there's secrets good night