War With A Mate - Episode 20: Cyphers, Sand And A Tranquil Land

Episode Date: April 18, 2025

Water, water everywhere and not a drop to drink! In a state of elation at finally ending the water distribution phase, James has developed a messiah complex. Meanwhile, Andy is struck with a case of the Nihilisms, realising James was right all along about the game and the current optimist is simply mania. All this as well as a stand-out mail segment and Andy’s delve into Enigma’s history provides what can definitively be called, an episode of the podcast.

good evening and welcome to war with a mate it's james and andy andy you just did a little belch into the mic we'll have to try and trip that out i lean away from the mic it doesn't matter it picks up everything that's by choice these are professional mics these things are top quality it's not the only thing that's top quality look at us two top quality fellows sure yeah i got a lot more sleep this week i'm in much better spirits much better if i actually prefer this yeah this is way better this is more like it this is me at peak peak performance i'm I'm here, baby, I'm ready. And boy, what a day it's been.

We've made use of this energy. We have been churning through some of the game. Yeah, we'll finish the water distribution segment. Fuck yeah, we did. We finished the water distribution segment. Everyone, well, not everyone, some people don't have water. Unfortunately, not everybody got their thirst quenched.

Oh my God, they're getting a little drink at least. Yeah, your guys are. Your guys are. Not the bad guys. we are we are not all getting water again it's the royal we I'm not a bad guy, I'm one of the good guys

in real life, but in the game I'm the bad guys in the game so it's good that I didn't get water but for the purposes of the game it is important that I have water but that's only one or two guys, for the most part they got it and it's not actually as

bad as I thought it would be, distributing that water took a little while for us to get to grips with it but we've passed it out the big benefit is that we only need to give water to the infantry for now all of the other units the motorized ones they only need water if they move turns out that's how cars work they don't need a drink because they're thirsty they need a drink to get moving yeah they sweat the water out they sweat it out when they drive so you need to feed the radiator Yeah, it comes out of their paws, the car paws. Yeah.

That's actually, I imagine, a key point in one of the Cars films. I imagine they get into the anatomy of the cars and how that works. Never seen them. You've never seen any of the Cars films? No. That's embarrassing, really. Is it? Yeah.

I haven't seen a children's movie. You were a child once, were you not? Yes or no, hotline question. Oh, when Cars came out? Yeah, you were, when the first one came out. Nah, it was more recent than that. No, to be fair, you are 73 this year?

So, yeah. So we better get a move on with this. Wow, we picked a really bad retirement hobby. I hope you've got your heir nominated. I do. Who is it? I'm not telling you. Oh, okay.

Because then you might prepare. Yeah, well, I didn't prepare this time around, so I suppose I should. My strategy is to die at the right time to a tactical genius so it's all about your succession plan to victory okay that's a good way to prepare like a dynasty for this yeah i'm empire minded dynasty minded i like it i like it so were the um the italians in this instance actually so we've got a bit of that on both sides then what we don't have unfortunately is idris elba he didn't show up today which is

disappointing we'll be hearing from our lawyers oh you'll be getting another email this one won't be as polite this one will be even more pathetic uh between him and michael mcintyre the world of showbiz is becoming a real antagonist for this podcast but we've we've made it through the water phase so right now we don't need to worry about that we're all in we're all in good spirits or at least i am and i'm in very good spirits it feels good to see the back end of those spreadsheets until next week. Yeah, that's not the back end

of anything. But it feels like progress. It is progress. I'm glad it feels like it. Honestly, this feels like the most progress we've made so far. There's just something about getting through that part of the game, the part of the admin task that I was just

dreading every single week. It's finally gone. We can do something a little bit different now. This is where this is coming from as well. what's that you being like well we're gonna blow through the rest of the turn well what we do have hit the accelerator because these are not going to be as fun as you think they are they are they are so what we're going to do now is give you a bit of a breakdown as to what is coming up next in terms of steps so a brief recap as to what we've actually ticked off so far

so we start with the initiative determination phase that's quite easy in this scenario because i go first and then you pick me and then yeah i get to pick who goes first i picked you so that was nice and easy then it's strategic air planning stage which i can't do because i i don't have any planes that are in locations that will allow for strategic air movement i can't bomb malta i have planes that are in the area to bomb malta so that was nice and easy you did you planned something you planned to try and find my shipping convoys didn't and you failed so nothing there nothing happened there then it's the designation phase which was to assign airplanes to fly land support or strategic missions we assigned pretty much all of them to land support and because of the weather

we can't do them so that's also ticked off fantastic axis malta availability determination phase that's nice and easy because it's an abstracted table and because of the scenario we're playing it's fixed in one area and again because i don't have any planes in the area nothing happens then was the malta raid phase as you may have guessed based on what i just said nothing happened then it's the naval convoy phase the naval convoy schedule phase which i actually did do so that was to plan my shipping convoys they are en route they are not all that far away now so that was picking which ships are dropping off which supplies to which city so we've got that to look forward to that was something i actually did then it's the convoy resolution phase which

didn't really come into it because it's just lane assignment and then after that yeah you you didn't even get to find them i didn't find anything so i couldn't bomb it you didn't even get to assign to the lane you didn't do the recon part of that then it was store expenditure which you've heard us talk about recently that was actually distributing the food so we did do that and after that well part of that by the way is also the evaporation um isn't it yeah yeah that's evaporation so that means we are now in first operation stage yep so the first operation stage first point is initiative declaration phase which we did early because we were trying to put together and ideas to how this works so we did that a long time ago as we did weather determination phase

we've been backfilling the admin so we've known what the weather was for a little while now then it was the organization phase step one being water distribution segment we've just done that okay so now that takes us on to some more steps so should i give a quick rundown as to what we've got in store yeah i mean yeah let's have a little preview before we get to it next week so next we've got reorganization segment that is where we can attach and or assign different units reinforcements replacements there won't be much activity there because at the moment i i don't want to touch anything i think you've got some stuff in mind i'm gonna do a little bit of stuff there yes you're gonna reattach or reassign some units make a bit of movement

just for the ease of getting people around. That's fair enough. I'm keeping mine as is. I think I'm going to be quite stationary for these first few stages while I get food and water to everyone. That's fair. Then is the attrition segment.

That's any losses because of lack of food or water. That can't happen yet because there haven't been enough stages without it. However, that's coming up real soon for my guys because they are not going to be fed or watered very well. Next op stage. Yeah, next op stage, people are leaving. People are dying.

Then we've got construction. We need to look into a bit. Yes, because that would be great. It does block construction in the middle three map tiles, but there might be some construction happening on maps A and E at the far ends. Yeah, the peripheral maps might get a bit of action because you can build things like minefields, you can build fortifications, extra airfields, airstrips.

So there's a lot of things you can build with a lot of utility. However, because it's just the peripheral maps, it might be not worthwhile it also uses up stores which are also food have you got any road missing or anything or you want to make a shorter route so there's definitely some utility within that but the weather limits that and the last few parts of this organization phase are the training segment which is to get replacement points for units again we've not really lost anyone so not a huge amount of utility in that yet the supply distribution segment which is to unload and load trucks there's a little bit of utility in there that will be useful and used and then finally the

tactical shipping segment which is moving our ships that are on the map not the ones that move from off-map locations so that's moving the close quarters ships if you will so that covers off the organization phase and then we've got some more phases to come but we'll not get too ahead of ourselves that's that's what's coming in the near future and as i've said in a lot of those there's not a whole lot so ideally ideally and i'm saying this through my rose-tinted glasses that won't take too long this time that's the caveat this time because we are we're flying through those ones probably because this time around the weather and the starting location of all my stuff means i can't do a thing yeah so there you go yeah we won't be doing those segments as fully as we'd

like i guess because of the weather yeah i mean i hope we fly through them but we did think we were going to start moving things about eight weeks ago so well we are going to share your optimism but uh i'll tell you what we're moving andy we're moving mountains okay i know okay we're moving we're moving mountains we're moving hoops and dreams from this doesn't mean anything from esoteric uh nebulous spaces in the ether into the hearts and minds of not just you and i but all of the all of the downtrodden hopeless souls that are listening to this and thinking come on i just need this i just need them to beat the game so that so that i can have that spark in my heart again so that i can be i can be me again okay and that's all absolutely great but

my face doesn't say that my point was it might be longer than we think before we move our units around okay right i see where you're getting at so i think we can we can meet the middle there moving that's don't do don't do that hand gesture like you didn't believe what i just said that's all great you're not saying that like a man who believes it's great you're saying that like a man who doesn't care what i'm saying and you want to talk about oh might take a while to do that it doesn't matter how long it takes it doesn't matter how long it it matters what matters is how we feel doing it how do you feel doing it right now andy frustrated why what about this is frustrating what about it isn't heartwarming

i don't know i can't put my finger on it something feels off something's not quite right well i think i think overall everything is going absolutely swimmingly all it took was this little zesty pick-me-up of completing some spreadsheets and getting to the end of it to to really wake me up that's what it was that's why i was sleepwalking through my life it's because i hadn't finished that spreadsheet now that i have my eyes are open the sky is blue the birds are singing i can feel my heartbeat again andy you're not gonna finish that spreadsheet for eight years you finished

shut your mouth you finished a row on the spreadsheet shut your mouth you see I've been kind of positive up till now and you've been

quite pessimistic but I feel like we flipped this afternoon for some reason yeah because you don't like that now I know

whether or not my men are getting water you wanted that to break me the not knowing the not knowing you wanted the uncertainty to cripple my strategy

and it didn't how do you feel about that well now i'm certain they're all dying of thirst i actually feel bad they're not all dying of thirst not until next off stage i'm gonna get water to them before then and there's not there's not a force on heaven or earth apart from that rainstorm they're not dead from thirst yet they have started dying of thirst oh we're all dying of thirst technically until we stop it from happening you're dying from thirst right now probably because you haven't Drangony Liquid for four days. That's wild. Well, I've got to get in the mindset. I wouldn't ask

these guys to do anything I wouldn't do myself. These aren't guys. These are cardboard pieces with magnets strapped to their ass. Which I also tested. Yeah, I wanted to talk to you about that. I can't get out of this chair. Every time you sit on a park bench, there's just a clunk as you get stuck to it for weeks.

It's a rough life. That's why we're having to do all of these play sessions al fresco. in a park that'd be fun we should take this outside at some point we shouldn't we're never taking this outside we're going to a local park no no we're not taking it to a park all the benches just put it down on a football pitch at a park that'd be good fun you know what else is good fun communication oh okay you hear that that could have gone anywhere that little well i was going to do the sound effect today but instead i'll just leave it to myself in the future Oh, James.

There we go. See? See what I did there? Synergy between me and my future self. Well, at least you're on the best-saved page about something, eh? Yeah. I've connected with myself in the future. Well, we've had, as always, some fantastic correspondence from those people who are trying to bridge the gap between the deserts of our minds and the outside world.

Trying to invite that little bit of light into this place. We do need it. hey it's it's it's already it's already filled me up today so let's see what we've got going on you've got a you've got the one to open this up i believe our first little bit of correspondence what we got going on dear andy and james stop love the podcast stop particularly like recent historical context segments stop if you could add remove or change one rule from the game which would it be stop subtle humble and brave stop ren stop now you p.s i wear poncho regularly stop long live poncho so for context that that email has the subject line telegram

so i think i think what uh what's happened yes that was in the format of a telegram i wasn't editorializing by saying stop because when i first read that one and didn't look at the subject i thought someone was trying to send us a subliminal message to stop playing the game. Just a very ham-fisted one. That's a superliminal message. It's just a message. Megaliminal messaging. It's just got the word stop a lot.

So it's very creative. It's all in caps as well so it does feel a little bit like shouting but I imagine that's what telegrams are like. Yeah, they didn't have that for a lower case still later. Yeah, and it's all urgent if it's a telegram. It's like, you've got to hear this. This is so urgent I didn't wait to travel to you.

You need to know this right now. It's important, yeah. So yeah, that's coming from Ren. So yeah, rule you could add, remove, or change? Oh, if I could add, remove, or change one rule. I mean, right now, just for the sheer grueling nature of it, it would be all of that water shit. Right now, probably the pasta rule.

I know everyone thinks it's quirky and fun, but when it affects James personally, it's not quirky and fun. It's just, it's bad. I'd probably, would I keep that? I think I would. You know what it would be? It would be breakdown points. you're getting rid of them i'd get rid of them you're just perfectly working cars yes and i know

that would ruin the game in terms of it being as difficult as it is but if i've got the choice to remove any and the game still works other than that it's the breakdown points because i think that's going to be one of the worst parts of this i'm not i agree with that i think movement is excited to get to it gonna be a bit awkward it's gonna be very awkward because every time we move anything with wheels we have to consult a chart roll some dice see if it breaks down if it does all the supplies on it are just fucking stuck out there in the desert so there's so much of it that's going to be a real hassle so that would be it for me what about yourself have you got anything aside from that no it's a perfect game you burg apologist i think honestly it really again defeats

the whole point of the game i think i'd consolidate like fuel stores and just make a supply thing yeah you don't have separate stuff for everything i don't know if i might just pick up your neighbor sneezing so loudly that it came through the walls well yeah i think that would be it and you've also there you go you've got another poncho fan uh but to be fair i don't mind a poncho it was the capes that you know that bothered me So we're all right with the ponchos. No one's agreed with me, really. Ponchos seem to have struck a nerve.

Ponchos have. So that's because it was the common ground. It's the sensible middle place. So thank you for that, Ren. That's got us thinking about what we're not looking forward to in future. Sort of putting a damper on my joyous mood. It doesn't feel like a ray of sunshine. It feels like a crack in the ceiling, a little bit of rain trickling in.

However, Ren, rain also is what we need to water my men. So I guess every cloud. That doesn't help water. Because when we did roll that, we were like, oh, cool, we don't have to do water because they'll just use rain. Nope. Well, we're smarter than the people in the past, Andy. I mean, that's just uniformly true.

Every generation, we get infinitely smarter. That's how that works. Sorry, everyone prior to me. Sorry, my ancestors. What have we got next? How about a web form from the website? and it's from marcus marcus says i was going to read out the how can we help part of the start but that's that's just what our web form says for some reason it asks how we can help um it's not

really how that should be prefaced we can't really help with much but we can at least respond to this marcus says just wanted to say this is a fantastic podcast founded due to cam sandwich binged the entire series over an 11 hour drive through texas looking forward to another eight years when is the huel sponsorship happening you're sure to become a monetizable podcast soon plus merch a snuggie would let you have enough room to print the entire board of the game onto it full scale well thank you marcus in terms of the huel sponsorship that's a very good question if anybody has an in with huel let us know because they're playing coy at the minute they are they're playing hard to get we know they're aware of us they must be they have to be just from the sales

alone in our local area i boom them up quite a lot so if they want some real traction send them our way uh binging over an 11 hour drive through texas that would be that's quite the backdrop i mean you've got the heat you've got the uh the mesas you know you've got a lot of stuff that sort of maybe feels like you're part of the game part of the game maybe picture texas is a big desert well there you go so you've drove through the the deserts of texas so yeah that that's that's a cool backdrop for that that's a great way to spend the drive we're flattered um in terms of merch is snuggie i think this message might actually predate the poncho discussion or the very least it's a good coincidence so maybe that's what we need to do maybe a poncho instead maybe

we got a poncho with the game map printed on it there we go anyone wants wants these ponchos let us know we'll put them together 20 000 british pounds per poncho it's not our fault that's just production costs so let us know if anyone's interested in that 20k poncho so we'll uh we'll see what we can do about about mass producing those maybe bringing the cost down for those ponchos what we got next the tariff situation on the punch well that's it the tariffs you know not sure how this will sound in 10 years time with those tariffs but right now oh it's looking dicey it's looking dicey but we do have an international message next from uh from cedric hello from switzerland there we go the only country that lived a more boring world war ii

than what you are living trying to learn the rules oh cedric you've you've put a knife in my heart first i have to admit that i jumped over a few episodes i've listened to the first five or six ones and went straight to episode 15 and i want to say that i'm really getting more interesting according to my tastes obviously i'm looking forward to listening to more of what you'll publish i usually play the episode when cleaning the house and this mindless task is the perfect thing to stay focused on what you're discussing i know that you already got too much mail at this point but i have the feeling reading it will be better than being depressed thinking about the game spot on anyway two questions for you first as a war gamer myself mainly solo because i

never managed to coerce my friends into playing that kind of game at least the heavy ones something that killed a few war games for me was stacks of counters in old war games particularly when you have to stack tons of really small counters it stopped being fun is that something that happens in north africa do you have to manage death stacks and move them around regularly or is it mainly a game with a single two or three counter in a single space i'm currently 49 years old what are the odds that i'm gonna die before you finish the game thanks for your service and for what i gathered you were both british i think the fact you jumped into the absurdity of this game made a postcast about it and forced yourself into getting to the end while highlighting all that

is wrong with it is probably something that wouldn't come from anywhere else have fun question mark cedric well cedric um the hand strikes and gives a flower because there are some parts in That really broke my heart. You jumped over some of the episodes. Probably for the best. I hope you haven't skipped the Bin Weevils one and the one about Michael McIntyre. I imagine you have, though,

because they are pretty early on and not at all related to the game. So, yeah, I would say if you are interested in the game, you've found yourself in the right place now. Episode 15 is the jump-on point for people who want to know about the game. Everything else is a practice run. A practice run of the practice run.

so i would say yeah everything in there um the the questions are really yeah thankfully we do have answers for them the one i'm stuck on is will will you die before we finish the game i i really don't know i'm really sorry i don't know a lot of variables i don't have the values for on that one if you could send us your medical records we will be able to give you a bit of a clearer answer uh right now um if you feel you know bad sending it over email um just uh i don't know um put it on the web form on the website send it over that way secure web form that'll be fine yeah yeah it'll be fine it's encrypted well it's not encrypted but um well just email it but your first question um as a wargamer yourself you have had issues with the the death stacks

a lot of counters on top of each other uh that would be a massive issue in this game part of saving grace is that the hq units it they encapsulate all of the attached ones the smaller ones that are part of it so one hq counter can represent what would be otherwise about 30 other counters the game does have those 30 other counters for example they all represent the individual units and at any time as part of the reorganization phase you can break off those counters and have them wander off in their own direction so we could in theory have at any given time and this isn't even unrealistic 50 to 60 counters all in one hex but represented by one or two yes oh well i mean if you wanted to break them up and you know unattach them you could

actually have all 60 for example there is there is another mechanic that stops you doing that there's a limit on stacking so each like tile or unit has a stacking point value and then i think it's terrain based there's a limit to how many stacking points you can have in a square yes yes so that stops the death stack to a certain extent as well because there's a mechanical limit on how much you can put in the same place yes so some yes so some terrain you can have um for example off the top of my head i can't even think of what they would be but it's sort of yeah like a stacking limit of 10 for example and smaller units would represent one point on that stacking table so you could have a lot of smaller ones all stacked up and then i could have some so we could both have

say 10 stacked up 20 hq units don't really count towards the stacking value then you can have trucks airfields so you can have a lot of stuff stacked on that does really mount up those numbers it's unlikely that it would happen because of the fact we'd rather have the hq units and the more mechanical element to it in terms of physical logistics is we've got magnets on them yeah and if we want to stack it up vertically at the end of the play session we need to find a way to try and evenly distribute them that's less about the gameplay that's more about how we actually put the game away afterwards well so be careful with it the game also has breakout zones where it's like this city is going to have a lot of people in it so we've added a square for you to

put extra stuff in if that and we because of the magnets we can also just use post-it notes so if we do have a hex that would end up with a death stack for whatever reason it'll likely end up in a breakout like zone yes so we won't have the cities for example yeah this the cities have a lot to brook is one of them so to brook has a holding box yes on the map next to it so you can put in it's a box that's the size of sort of six or seven hexes so you can just pop in a bunch of units on there to represent that they're all in to brook and it saves you having to stack them up because you will have units coming in from shipments you'll have reinforcements so it's a good place to hold them so yeah it is something the game has actually tried to remedy to an extent

so you mentioned it is in older war games yes and this game has actually fought that through to an extent it'll be interesting to see if it holds up when we start throwing both armies into very small areas so yeah we're interested to see how that pans out so that's how it's looking for now

hopefully you don't die before we finish it but to be fair if you feel like things are getting a little bit dicey you've already skipped through a lot of the episodes by the sounds of it so just let us know if things are looking bad and we'll give you the spoilers we'll just we'll tell you what we think will happen i'm gonna win no well also don't don't

don't give away the spoilers on on the pod oh sorry we're only only like 16 episodes in or something well 20 actually and yes we are british yes uh uh accents probably give that away to an extent we are british i do like the idea that being stupid enough to do this is a uniquely british trait i imagine yeah we are probably marred by other nations for that and to be fair just had a look there the the subject is brackets it's hard to write the telegraph sound we appreciate it though the onomatopoeia is always appreciated so thank you for that cedric thank you who do we have next oh this this is a good one this is a this is a corker so this is from schmungus joe thank thank you already schmungus for the name alone hey guys

I found your work through the cam sandwich cameo and have since listened to all 18 episodes that have come out so far thank you good binge I was struck by your recent conversation regarding what supernatural creatures would be most useful in your endeavors in the desert war I would like to propose the dunghaven hooter a fearsome critter of northern united states folklore folklore folklore folklore jesus that was it i mean i've just had to read out dung avenuda so give me a little bit of a break yeah that's why i'm sort of how did you fall over because i was focused on dung avenuda that's fair i don't even know i'm saying that right the dung avenuda real it's fine the dung avenuda is a crocodile-like creature that is purported to

be excellent at hiding with satanic cunning and surprisingly surprisingly surprising oh my god surprising their prey in an instant their prey is said to be almost exclusively people it prefers drunk people but i'd imagine it could do the average soldier in a pinch and then we've got pros and cons pros the dunga venuda needs no food or water to survive so it would not be a drain on your already thin supplies which also means it wouldn't be on the spreadsheet, so I love that. Yeah, you wouldn't have to keep track of that. That's perfect. Oh, yes! In fact,

the Dungay Venuda has no mouth at all. Instead, it instantly pulverises their prey to vapour and huffs the vapour through its unusually large nostrils. Which is just insane. That's a cool pro. I like that a lot. Cons. The Dungay Venuda usually hides behind brush or bushes,

which I imagine are not in abundance in North Africa. However, I would like to think it could be trained to hide in supply drops instead. Further highlighting its utility as a trained assassin. I hope to see a Dung Avenuda piece in all future playthroughs. Sincerely, Schmungus Joe. And we also have an incredible illustration of the Dung Avenuda.

You do have to put that on the Instagram. I will be putting that on the Instagram. Yeah, that is... So, that's some fantastic work there, Schmungus Joe. That is... Yeah, it's great. I like the idea of showing up to a supply dump, but it's like, is it a dummy supply dump or real?

or is there a Dunghaven Veneuter in it? It's like, oh, if there is, what happens? Well, the unit's dead. It's been huffed. Yeah, they get turned into vapour, of course. We have to roll probably at that point on the Dunghaven Hooter vapour table to determine how much of them are vapourised. That is also affected by the bad weather,

how hot it is, how dehydrated they are. Does the Dunghaven Veneuter have a sinus infection? That's a good point. So it can't sniff up as many people? Is it one of its ill days? is rommel there because if rommel's there then he can't inhale at all he's flabbergasted by the presence of such a man so there's a lot of things to factor in there but that is some incredible research and the pros and cons list wow we will definitely be looking to put our own dungy venuda

piece into the game probably not in this one but what we will do i guess after the full playthrough is do the supernatural version yeah we'll add cryptids we'll add the camel rules we'll add yeah yeah we'll do we'll do new game plus when we finish the first playthrough well that's fantastic thank you for that joe that gives us a whole other view on what kind of monsters and beasties should be introduced thank you very much so who's we'll do one more so we uh let's have a look oh it's actually a this is a second email from somebody who we've actually replied to previously patrick and that's because it it actually ties into something that you were already going to talk about i believe so while you read a question about there being espionage it reminded me of

their enigma machine being cracked in 1940 are there rules for it such as after turn 57 the allies get to ask one question uh per every 10 turns about the german's movements uh and the german player has to be honest about something such as truck movement or what is shipping would be an interesting concept thanks again patrick um also patrick um just we will have to check to see because he's mentioned turn 57 there i'm gonna have to check and see if turn 57 probably aligns yeah i'm gonna have to check and see if that aligns with the actual date because each turn is a week so we're gonna get back to you on that patrick because if you've done that research hats off ponchos off i believe you've got quite a bit of information on that one

there yeah but just to answer the question about enigma in the game first there's no specific rules from what i can see in it i imagine they've been sort of like looped into the reconnaissance chances and the mediterranean or stuff like that but yeah there's no explicit rules but it does lead nicely into uh i'm gonna do talk about enigma for a bit yeah into enigma yeah let's hear it cool uh first off give you a bit of intro on signals in general in this period because enigma is the big one you will have heard of uh that's the machine and encoding they use for high command but underneath that you'd have like uh merchant fleets or businesses would also all have their own ciphers so there's this sort of big environment of ciphers and networks that all

interact with each other so enigma was because that's the one that uh turing famously played a big part in decoding um there's the film the imitation game which i've seen that's sort of my only knowledge of enigma right yeah so i'll jump into enigma then enigma is not a specific advice enigma's a brand kind of like kleenex or tissues or tannoy is for loudspeakers yeah uh yeah so when they talk about breaking enigma they're not breaking one specific thing it's a the device uh evolves and changes over the war as the techniques do it's sort of a war back and forward okay okay uh but the way it sort of works without going too crazy into detail is it's got a typewriter keyboard and then above that there's another keyboard um and when you press a button

on the typewriter keyboard a bunch of gears and stuff rotate electrical signals uh get all scrambled and it substitutes it for another letter okay so i'm typing on a like a laptop keyboard for example yeah i hit w and it hits an e instead yeah and yeah and he would light it up and then the person sending the message would then copy that new message down and they'd send that encoded one over morse code and signal like radio waves okay because you can't do directly point to point it's radios area wide so anyone can get it that's a good signal you send so you need to encrypt it yeah so you almost type it out i guess yeah typewriter it's almost like typing it out onto a piece of paper yeah some guy then gets the message that's just complete gobbledygook yeah

and then sends that yeah and then to decode it at the other end someone who's listening to the frequency on a specific like radio frequency would then take the message and then set their enigma machine up exactly the same way and then type in the scrambled message and then the right letter would light up on the top keyboard okay so they would have to know the configuration yeah so they'd send them off with like on this date configure this this way like these are the settings for one day and then the next day the settings are different okay right yeah and part of what made enigma so difficult to crack was when you pressed a when you pressed like a letter and got a new one the gears and rotors would then move and refix

so the next letter it's not exactly the same like substitution thing okay so i press that w first time it substitutes for an e and then i press the w chunks away in the machine press w again it might be k okay right i didn't know that i thought yeah it would be the same letter constantly so every every keystroke is a random substitute yes okay right well that's probably why it was so hard to crack well that yeah that's basically what you're doing with encryption is you're turning a structured ordered rep message into as close to a random number as you can yeah okay okay and then it gets decoded because you can't make it fully random as it were yeah of course but so um i'll just look at it here so there's five different things in the enigma

machine they can change there's like rotor wheels ring settings the way the electricals set up so there's a bunch of different things so there's like a crazy amount of settings you can get so basically when you send a message of enigma there's a three to ten to the power of 114 options like possible permutations that's pretty wild i mean i've seen a video slight tangent on how big 52 factorial is yeah in terms of um shuffling a deck of cards yes and how there's more combinations to shuffle of deck of cards than there are atoms on earth yeah and and then this is orders of magnitude so it's and this is 100 instead of 52 yes so yeah we're talking about it's it's essentially infinite yeah it may as well be infinite i mean yeah functionally which

is why the germans were so fine to use it for so much of the war of course i'd be confident and theoretically it shouldn't have been breakable except for procedural failures that reduced the randomness slightly so decoding of enigma starts with a german man called hans philo schmidt who works in the german cipher office in berlin and has access to some of the enigma documents he's also a french spy oh dear oh schmitty so in december 1931 he hands these documents over to the french who have a crack at the code of them and just go no and hand out so they get in touch with the polish and the british and hand these resources over um and the polish are originally the ones who start to make progress okay like a lot of it um

especially a guy called marianne regiewski and the polish cipher bureau they go to work and break enigma for the first time in december 1932 so a year later oh wow so this was actually technically broken well before the the sort of famed breaking of it in in 1940 i think it was so they had cipher text they had a lot of the stuff um so what they essentially develop is like a bunch of mathematical tools to attack enigma okay to try and get the daily codes and stuff which includes a bunch of like very advanced maths which now like underlies a lot of information theory and modern cryptography still so these guys were some of the the progenitors for yeah a lot of stuff probably still used now then uh yeah like absolutely and they like they have sheets

where they've pre-calculated like all the permutations for like the ring segment so they can like go through that and they can be like so this is how the rings are set up and they gradually break it down and they decrypt it partially because the germans have bad information procedures so like the first part of an enigma message is a key that they then used to decode it but they found people were using like aaa or like bbb for instance or like keys next to each other on the enigma keyboard okay when they were meant to be totally random oh right so somebody it's like it's like typing your password as password yeah we're just not conscious of being careful on top of the security that are provided they weren't they wouldn't

repeat their own codes as like one guy but if you're using like aaa bbb and there's another lazy guy he's also going to use aaa bbb oh and you and you all get the same configuration yeah and then you've got two messages where you've got the same key bit yes okay so that makes sense they weren't there like if those mess-ups weren't there it would have been actually impossible rather than almost impossible so as always it's human error yes that has caused a massive issue because you've got a machine with infinite permutations and then it all it takes is a person or i guess multiple people to be lazy with it and not use the tool correctly they also what they were doing uh a bit later on but another example of the mess ups is if messages would go out from german high command on

enigma but then it would like arrive at a local area and then they'd use a lower level code okay and then they could go well this message came through we tracked this enigma message we can't read but then there was an order to like send a bunch of planes off so that enigma message would contain the word planes right okay stuff like that so they can then determine the content of the message in essence to try and yeah right okay okay i'm getting to how they might have done that now yeah so the polish uh cryptographers are doing like great work here but poland's about to get invaded that will probably hamper efforts i would imagine so they flee to romania and from romania to france and set up something called the pc bruno which is kind of their bletchley park

okay it's outside paris um so they've been they've cracked enigma but it's not in a timely fashion at this point you might so they can break some enigma messages but it might take months and they change daily did you change daily yes so it's pointless information at that point yeah you can't act on it in a timely manner at all but then and then they hit another setback 1938 they had two extra rotors uh they used to be free they had five which changes the possible combinations of just the wheels from six to 60 and then you think of all other things multiplying together it's a factor of 10 on it basically so now a factor of 100 so yeah it's 110 factorial now rather than 100 so it was already infinite but now it's got even worse yeah and that also sets back i guess all

of the theory that they had behind it before a lot of the tools still work but they're like the sheets of calculations they've done ahead of time all need to be scrapped because they're not valid anymore oh god all that pre-work uh you know what i feel a lot better about playing the game now knowing what the horror that's like if somebody showed up tomorrow and they went oh by the way we've added another rule book so you now have to relearn all the rules yeah so the The first decryption of a wartime message is 1940, the 17th of January. They decode a message that was sent three months earlier, which, with their updated machine, so they now know they can break Enigma.

They just can't do it in a timely manner. I guess also like the game. Yeah, which is where Bletchley Park comes in, because what they essentially do is it goes from this sort of, high-level mathematicians doing crazy long calculations and stuff. Bletchley Park industrialises it. Okay. So first, it's like they hire people who do crosswords.

Like, anyone who's good at puzzles and stuff gets hired and taken to Bletchley Park. And then, like, those sheets I mentioned, they'll be applied in one hut. And then, like, another technique might be applied in another. Oh, okay, right. and then this is where Turing comes in with the

they're called bombs cryptological bombs which is a cool name which is the first computers that led to Colossus which is when they end up breaking Enigma most days they get the code before midnight oh wow so they're getting it now

on a daily basis day to day yes this leads to the next really big problem you have with this which is you've got all this information about what the germans are doing but the second you do something and act on it in a way you can't justify otherwise they will know their codes have been cracked which to be fair imitation game i know um you'd mentioned to me that it

the film might not be very accurate based on the information that you've got but that is something they touch on in the film so i'd recommend maybe watching it just for maybe even that part but yeah you make a really good point because you blow everything out the water you blow if you give that away then that's every piece of work you've done like you said before about adding the extra two wheels yeah at that point everything you've done up to that point is is ruined and you've given the game away so yeah how does that pan out so this well one distribution this is where they set up ultra which is ultra top secret which is above top secret which is a very short list of people on earth who have access to this information it's like presidents and generals in the field

which i believe actually montgomery was a part of yes montgomery was utilized it a lot um because some generals didn't like it and didn't use it particularly well from what i can see and other generals were like well into it and saw the value because so yeah um so to distribute it they were sending they'd have liaison teams uh which would they decode the message encode it with their codes they knew the germans hadn't broken fire it off to the theater where they'd be decoded someone would take the message to the one like person there the general who's allowed to read it show him it he wouldn't be able to copy it down or anything it's just like remember this and then it would be destroyed yeah i mean you don't want that to get out so

so um but some of the ways they obfuscated which were quite fun well not fun but yeah so for instance it had a huge effect on the battle of the mediterranean a couple of ways one the germans used enigma to organize a parachute drop to try and take over greece okay they decoded that and basically set up guns at the landing sites for these paratroopers so they jumped out of the plane just directly into gunfire

it was a complete disaster for the Nazis, which is a key reason why Hitler never went forward with the invasion of Malta, because it would require parachute drops, because it's an island so he had the failed invasion

in the back of his head yeah, because if that happens again and Mulder I would imagine as well compared to Greece you're looking at a much smaller scale to work with so if that went bad in a bigger area, a whole country then yeah, wow

that will put the fear of, not God but guns into them and to use it to hunt convoys for instance they'd get the Enigma thing in, decode it and be like, right there's a ship leaving from Sicily to Tunisia

we send out a plane on a scouting run to where we know the ship is going to be the german ship sees it and radios off a message like we've been spotted and then they go and attack it having known where it was the whole time but they need the observation planes to be spotted i like that a lot yeah so at one point it becomes the the nazi suspect the allies have 400 submarines in the mediterranean and a huge fleet of reconnaissance aircraft at malta in reality they had 25 submarines and at some point as few as free aircraft for reconnaissance oh that must be because i mean a lot of nazi high command i imagine don't survive to find out the

facts but the ones that did the ones who found out those numbers afterwards must have felt like a right bunch of prats well i'll go over it next week next week i'll do a specifically how it's involved in the north africa campaign but rommel at various times was pretty sure the code had been broken because of the way things were reacting but he'd never had enough sway to be like we need to abandon this whole thing it's a massive thing to ask people to drop so rommel was ahead of the curve then eh oh dear because yeah they had enigma machines for high command army air force that were all slightly different so it's that thing of the enigma not being one thing they broke the enigma probably dozens of times in different variations wow yeah that is

to be fair yeah i mean i've only seen the film about mostly about turing to be fair that film so that is a hell of a backdrop on what enigma was and what it was doing yeah and it does lend a lot of well patrick's question was you know does that play into this at all unfortunately not but that would be oddly enough a very cool rule yeah i've included and i've got no doubt richard berg would have put that rule in if he was given a bit more time and that is uh yeah very cool background on enigma yeah i i was going to say i understand it now i understand the principle of it probably couldn't have called the thing but well i probably could i'm i'm on i'm i'm on high at the moment i'm i'm in good spirits i could probably decode it well because it's all mathematical um

people you can just program them in modern computers yeah so you could just make an enigma decoder but yeah just one last thing about uh this before we move on to common ground because i thought this was insane when the polls were cracking the device they never physically saw one using only mathematical principles and intercepted messages they built an exact copy of an enigma machine despite the fact they never physically saw the designs or like one of them when you say exact copy so it looked more or less identical and functioned yeah the function i imagine would be the same do you know if it looked pretty similar uh it's not quite the same layout and stuff but but in essence it's the same machine yeah they essentially made

a device that was on the other side of the world by looking at radio waves with maths that's crazy crazy yeah that's awesome wow yeah that is that's weird yeah damn that is a hell of a background on yeah cryptography and espionage yeah something that we yeah we don't get to do a whole lot of in the game so it's it's it's fun to have the background on that that's uh as always you've delivered some incredible history andy some uh some something pretty smashing and yeah going into common ground almost feels a bit odd because i feel like i'm very on board with what you've delivered here i i also think enigma is uh exciting but should have been cracked and was cracked but i suppose we'll have to instead settle on finding some some common ground elsewhere

Another point of unified decisiveness. Something else to not so much bring us together, but I guess just keep us close at the moment. Stop us from drifting apart. Because we started this one off really not in the same headspace, it would seem. We've worked our way into it. Maybe the real common ground

were the things we've talked about along the way. No, I do actually have a common ground. Oh, good. And now for something nicer. A little oasis in the war. It's time for some Common Ground. I'm trying the intro for Common Ground. I'm recording.

Maybe. Yeah. Well, my Common Ground is, it actually relates to, I suppose, intelligence in a way. Okay. My Common Ground is, we should just give everything over to AI for a month and see if everyone was right. no just such a bad idea everyone who's thinking yo you know films would be bad if we let ai write them television would be bad information social media logistics across the world the

economy oh ai is gonna fix it all ai is gonna do the world wonders or i guess conversely ai is going to take over let's find out let's get it out the way because if it is going to end the world at some point soon in the future let's find out let's just do it now let's give it a go okay i disagree with your odds there slightly okay your options of it works or becomes sentient and takes over the world i think there's a four percent chance of it it takes over the world that's an interesting a one percent chance it works and a 95 chance it doesn't take over the world or anything it's just really shit yeah i think that probably will be the more likely outcome and we just see yeah we just see and then everyone can shut up about it okay i think it gets it out

of everyone's head because it'll be a really rough month but it might be worth it for the people to stop well i imagine it's probably what the cinema industry went through when 3d became a craze with the the red and blue glasses it's like this is it this is the big one and then no it wasn't yeah but they were using those glasses to like run hospitals there's a stakes issue there is there is and it's gonna be a hard month there's gonna be some um some difficult things that come on the back of that but that's ai's decision to make not ours I don't mind the idea we'll find a little parcel of like land for AI enthusiasts to move to

and then AI can handle that bit so it doesn't fuck up everything so we take the AI enthusiasts yeah they get to live in their utopia okay so we take the AI enthusiasts they get to go and live in their supposed utopia we also get the AI skeptics and they can observe it all

yeah and see if it does take over and if it does doom that little pocket of land and then both sides get their answer yeah and everyone benefits because two very annoying groups are busy elsewhere yeah the ai doomsayers and the ai fanatics are all off in some observation center it's a bit like the um the stanton prison experiment yes but bigger and with robots there's no oh actually yeah robots would be a fun way to to add some spice to that because the ai will become like one of the prison guards well it has to by its very nature whether or not

it goes well or not well it does become the overlord for that period of time and whether that means it gets stuck in a logic loop where it just continues to go over and over or if it does what a lot of ai text models seem to do which is eventually becomes racist and they need to try and stop it from doing that it's a it's a fun little thing they're gonna have to deal with there whether or not it dams that little sort of population pocket or whether it i don't know maybe saves them from the the churn of dystopian future we're hurtling towards it's it fixes it it just ticks it off i do like the concept of like let's just give this a try for a bit and everyone shut the hell up i just think it's gone on a while now and all of this it's like the y2k

thing it's like yeah i mean i suppose yeah that would be scary if it happens but we don't know if it will or not this way we know this way it's done and we can stop worrying about it no one needs to fret anymore it's it's one and done i think that's a good way to remedy that situation when you presented it i was very firmly against but you've talked me around yeah i know your thoughts on ai are very i'm a skeptic you're a skeptic you don't think ai is very useful no i also don't think ai is very useful i think ai has we use ai i think we might have mentioned this before we just use ai to generate pictures for our dnd campaign yeah we get ai generated images to stick up on our screen to go this is what the town looks like that we're

in or this is what my character looks like who's a a bear who uses the stars to see the future this is you know something that we use for a little bit of fun we don't use it to run our bank accounts no i'm also not scared it's going to run my bank accounts because i've been generating pictures of an orc who has a silly hat i don't i don't fear it i don't treasure it i think it's a little bit of fun okay and i think right now that's that's all it really is and i don't think it'll really get to be more than that it's a nice thought that it would be some massive benefit one day i don't know about that i don't know about that i also saw journey journey to the center of the earth with 3d glasses and that didn't change my life it didn't even change the life

of brendan fraser um who was um who was in that movie i can barely remember it yeah well it's probably because you had those stupid glasses on the whole time and instead it was a case of are these the right size is that something i'm doing wrong why does the film not look as good as i was promised it would be very funny if ai is also just for some reason slightly more cumbersome and less usable for people with glasses i mean yeah that's what that's what that was yeah ai should be like 3d films or paintballing where if you've got glasses it's just not very fun which is ironic because of course you associate uh you personally i guess the way i'm loading this You personally associate wearing glasses with being both nerdy

and an AI with being nerdy. So there you go. If you're a nerd, you've got glasses, and if you're a nerd, you love AIs. I think there's different types of nerds. You think? You think they're all just one big melting pot of hyper-intelligence? Certainly not hyper-intelligence.

Now, what is a nerd? Just a socially awkward guy who likes maths. no no i've met nerds who don't like maths no or at least nerds who are bad at maths yeah they're not even real nerds two of them here uh where the other ladies and gentlemen idris elba in the building idris elba i don't mean that i don't think i don't mean you're in the building i don't mean that you're in the building i also i don't think you're a nerd from what i know of you which is admittedly very little he boxes and talks about golden documentaries oh it's like The opposite of being a nerd.

Oh, and he's a hooligan. That's the type of nerd. It's a colloquial term for fans of Huel. Yeah. Don't know if you've got that. No idea. Because you're not in the Huelosphere. Yeah, sorry, that pun went straight over my head.

I could tell, you were looking around the room. So, I think what we've come to a conclusion of today is that we've made incredible progress. Just unsightly strides in what's going on in the game. we've decided that enigma very fun to talk about very scary in practice unlike ai which is fun in practice fun to talk about doesn't really do anything though and nerds have glasses and are not idris elba anything else that you need to add to that or have i summarized everything edge cultural analysis there we go i've got my finger on the pulse of society and now i'm going to look

it's dead i'm going to take that finger off now i'm going to take that finger off the pulse of society and i'm going to give it back to society it's in your hands now people what you choose to do with it is entirely up to you but if you want to put any of that cultural phenomenon in our direction then you can do so at info at war with a mate.co.uk our instagram which is just war with a mate and as for our youtube well that's now up yeah all the videos are going to be there now and I say videos it's just the audio with a still picture of the logo but hey if you prefer listening to stuff on YouTube it's on YouTube now so there you go you got a few options on how it is that you listen to what's going on so we're going to keep on plugging away at the game I hope you keep

on plugging away at that listen button which is not an actual button I think anywhere and any any questions, any queries quandaries, hopes or dreams anything you want to send our way, well it's an illustration of a monster, that's really one of my highlights today, I enjoy the cryptid info, yeah so you can

send it all over, we'll read it out at some point and I suppose for now that's us, yeah thank you for listening stay subtle, humble and brave and we'll see you out there in the deserts of my mind, goodnight We'll be right back.