War With A Mate - Episode 24: Graziani’s Defensive

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

And that’s a wrap folks, the first chunk of movement is officially over! With the lion’s share of the first operation stage in the rear view mirror, Andy tries to psychoanalyse some questionable tactical choices made by James - who appears to have cracked under the pressure. An extra-chunky history segment covers the scariest adventure-bros of their time and a Common Ground poised to save the world comes about - with some strings attached.

good evening all and welcome to war with a mate it's james and andy yeah it is it's you andy so andy tell me why you think that you're suitable for this role because no one else will do it correct correct uh are you suitable uh well you've just said no one else is able to do this or willing to do this so um i don't want to be caught in a lie um i have um good organizational skills i thought you didn't want to lie yeah okay good point i'm honest you just lied no that was that was just being playfully cheeky by lying by lying that's the best way to be cheeky you can't be cheeky while telling the truth i guess no yeah you can go on i'm putting you on the spot right now be cheeky and honest i don't want it that's a lie that's a lie that was cheeky

and it was a lie and that's why it worked that's why they love you but maybe i didn't want to be cheeky i just was yeah you you are inherently cheeky it's uh it's a quirk of yours a curse if anything the cheeky girls remember them i do actually what happened to them blast from the past oh yeah 15 minutes of fame because they did they did the the cheeky girl song which is we are the cheeky girls yeah we are the cheeky girls you are the cheeky boys you are the cheeky boys cheeky cheeky um there was probably more to it they didn't they didn't do the ketchup song did that was someone else i don't know you don't know i i've got to be honest i referenced them but i don't know much about them you stepped into this arena armed with the cheeky girls i thought you

were going to come out here with a bit more knowledge than just the cheeky girls existed in the past when has that ever happened i don't know usually you're armed you do history segments you do you're doing one today i am yeah is it about the cheeky girls and their career don't spoil it well you promised me it's a good one so if it's not about the cheeky girls now then you're full of shit it's about their ancestors who served in the war okay okay i am now interested in the heritage of the cheeky girls i wonder if any of them did have ancestors that fought anywhere in here maybe some of them are tiles on the map i feel like pretty much everyone in europe has a grandparent or from that generation who fought i don't think you really got out of that

war yeah they were quite strict on that it wasn't really an opt-in system for the most part yeah it was more case of you you have to try you were either like on the front lines or like bletchley parking or i feel like politician bletchley park from what you said was fairly elite you know we're talking about people that actually knew what they were doing not people you just pick up off the street and it's like you are here to fill a role it doesn't really matter what you did beforehand i feel like bletchley park you need to have a bit of a background you have to be good at crosswords that's a good back then though crosswords were all the rage they were crosswords back then are a little bit like having Candy Crush

on your phone now? I guess. Yeah, that's what it was. Did you have any iPhones back then, kids? All your iPads and your X-Stations? Playboxes? Yeah, they had to use desktop computers. Yeah, they didn't have laptops.

Losers. Or I guess computers that were entire buildings. Yeah, god, they were big back then. They were big. So, the podcast. we'll do a summarize the podcast Andy in four words

playing very long game okay do me one in three words long game playing I didn't say it and Yoda is also the persona you're taking on for this one well I could

you could but you didn't have to and I didn't commit to it afterwards but Yoda here is right long game playing I don't know why you also rose into nation like it's a question are you are we playing a game are you sure there's no way to tell

well there is because we just finished playing we didn't finish the game that would be a real fucking bombshell to drop 24 episodes in we finished the whole damn thing how about that we really sped up towards the end there we skipped some steps skipped a few aspects of the game like playing it

or even getting the game out but we did finish your movement phase we did we finished my movement phase which means all movement in operation stage one is done just got trucks to do it's just trucks and that also includes my my boats and your train you moved your train prematurely we found that out today i did move the train early it's glad thankfully not an effect it hasn't no you moved a bunch of guys um quite threateningly across the map but they didn't have any any real impact they were just around yeah turns out you can't do that you can't even do that now because they need to end in the rail hex and not use any cpa well they could do

that because they started there and hadn't used any cpa oh right so they wouldn't be able to yeah oh okay fair enough they started in cairo right okay so they can move part of my train network right so i will have to do something to them i mean i guess at some point in the game i have to otherwise i'm playing the game wrong but it was a very ominous move phase for me because i was just sit now watching while you kept like giggling to yourself and going that's evil i'm gonna do him he's in so much trouble and then you didn't attack anyone yeah yeah it's it's um it's called psychological warfare it worked i'm glad you seem to be on edge i am you're sweating you're biting your fingernails you're uh sort of shivering down your spine very visibly all the sort of

scooby-doo tropes you pull them all off i mean yeah the sweating and the finger biting is just standard yeah that's true yeah i'll give you that those are just sort of usual quirks of yours yeah but i didn't want to give too much away about my strategy so i just thought i'd throw in little sort of scary sound bites well it worked yeah yeah it did i guess that's our version of an enigma me sat on your floor me just eavesdropping on you planning to yourself it's not really eavesdropping when i'm i'm saying it for you it was i invited you to listen and you snatched it right up you gobbled it up so you're keeping so are you keeping the plan behind that secret or why didn't you attack anyone well i moved a few

units you did i moved the second libyan division away from you they were the ones who pinned your men at the end of last session uh yep and i moved them away i broke contact which means i had to spend some more cpa to get them away from your guys and sort of disengage from the the combat and i moved them back a little bit i moved them back to where the oreska regiment was and the oreska regiment moved a little bit further back as well creating a little bit of a a wall of sorts which means that to get past there you'll have to move into an enemy zone of control okay you're setting up a the graziani defensive yes that's what this is we're now entering graziani's defensive and as part of that i've moved my black shirts yeah who are your um elites from the elite

infantry at least they are they are my scary guys they have a lot of their sleeve i moved the first ccnn and the fourth ccnn they are the the black shirts and they are scary guys they've got a lot going on and I move them a little bit closer to you edge them towards the front lines, which means, yeah, you're kind of boxed in, if you want to get past them you're going to have to go through them, it's like that

scene in Spider-Man 2, when he's on the train and Doc Ock shows up and all the people in New York are like if you want to get to him, you've got to go through me, and me those New Yorkers stick together and me as well and me too

and also me and him I get it and him I come on him too who else

me okay and him so you're building a weird defensive wall of confused Italian American men and me

no and him for god's sake and then Doc Ock he goes oh very well and then he just splits them all apart

not like in half like he moves them to the side of the train with his robot arms yeah and then he takes peter parker spider-man spoilers oh that's really going to give so i guess i need to use the doc ock strategy and use big robotic arms to move your wall out of the way i think that's um i think that's in point 13 of the rules yeah it is actually think that's a breakdown yeah i think is what i just there's rules for dissembling the trucks and making your infantry of the Doc Ock. Richard Berg really thought of everything. Because that was...

I know that wouldn't have been well before Doc Ock. Doc Ock was already out. Richard Berg has plagiarized Marvel by putting Doc Ock into his game. You're not allowed to do that, Richard. That's against the rules. Probably. So, yeah, I've done that.

I've created a bit of a defensive wall. You're going to have a hard time getting through it. But more importantly, you're in danger down in the south. yeah i where i've got nothing except a lone sgsu yes that's right you've got standing there you've got some engineers that are there manning an airfield and do you remember what happened when you sent men against my airfield on their own uh nothing because that didn't happen that's right i'm glad you remember that was a trick question but what you tried to do was um kill them via

war crime yep and i plan on doing the same to your men the issue of course being that i couldn't move them all the way to there this turn because it would have taken far too much movement and i already stretched people quite thin so i'm nearly there i'm nearly at the the sewer oasis yeah and that is actually a win condition of the game of the scenario the mini scenario for me to control that and then also control a clean supply route up to i believe well help me out on this one it's your settlement is it to brook uh oh i don't know i've got mercer matruh mercer matruh i believe yes Mercer Matruh sounds right We should probably know this

What we're fighting for But Mercer Matruh yes I need to have a direct line up to them From Siwa Which is right down at the south of the map All the way up to the northern coast Basically I need to slice the map in half And control a line

You basically need half of Yeah Mercer Matruh is on map D Yes So you've got to do But Siwa's also on Siwa's on C But the Yeah

So you've got a sort of diagonal Yeah you've got to slice it from the bottom of C up towards sort of mid of D. So that's sort of part of the plan. So I'm going to be doing that. The issue with my guys that were moving up north is

some of them broke down. I lost some of my tanks today. Lost two tanks. Two tanks. Did you lose some trucks as well? No, I nearly did. Because we found out as well that light trucks add more

breakdown points than other trucks. because they're all flimsy and stuff and i had the adjustment rating for that which meant that they could have broke down but they didn't because i had that great rolling streak yes again that you mean the whole game yeah so far i've been killing it apart from when i rolled the rainstorm i'm not really too pleased with that to be honest that's fucked both of us up it has it has that's that's if anything it's given us a chance to get to grips with the land rules without worrying about those pesky airplanes yeah so that's that's a godsend really i think we've we've we've come out smelling like roses on that side um or the fertilizer at least yeah

yeah god we must fucking stink because it must be real warm in that desert it's quite warm here today and i i wore jumper and a jacket today that was stupid and you're not wearing a gilet i am i'm wearing a gilet that's what people don't often know and he's like i wear a gilet during the recording yeah because you've just left a gilet at my house for months yeah it's my gilet that i wear it yours i guess you can have a house really yeah i have it's like a dressing gown you'd probably be more annoyed if i left a dressing gown here and just whack that on i guess yeah yeah at least this is sort of like an outdoor coat at any point i could just be like oh i'm gonna pop this on and go and you'd be like oh fine he's taking it finally the gilet's gone

it just sort of lives on your sofa as well it's just occupied space permanently i'll just whack it on when i feel like it i feel like i'm outdoorsy i feel like an explorer i feel like a geography teacher famous explorers geography teachers well they take you on school trips don't they no they don't no you clearly don't have many friends that are geography teachers why are your friends who are geography teachers taking you on school trips um i don't know they of questionable numbers, maybe. Maybe because that's what friends do.

Not all of my friends play stupid board games with me, Andy. Alright? Some of them take me on nice trips to castles. You gonna do that? It's not even geography. Yeah, it is. It's not even geography. Yeah, castles are history. Castles are places. They're on top of the land and

from the past. But they are places. If you give me a list of places, I would be looking for castles straight away, then it's not a list of places. It's a list of hills. Or a list of ideas. Hills and castles.

There's two types of lists. Places or ideas. If there's no castles on there, then it's a list of ideas. That's good to know. Yeah, so, shopping list. That's ideas. I have an idea of what I'd like to buy.

So, that's what you put, you know, tomato sauce, passata. What are you buying? Are you combining them? Tomato puree. Just various forms of tomato. Tabasco. Well, I'm all for that. I like Tabasco.

Yeah, I know, I know. You've got a little bottle over there. yeah the jalapeno tabasco oh okay okay oh i might put that on some food when i'm here next time are you gonna buy your own buy my own tabasco i'm going to use yours i'm going to use your jalapeno tabasco that you've just advertised oh i've just remembered i've got ice cream in your freezer oh oh god this is particularly unstructured today isn't it yeah we're in a silly mood oh clearly clearly well it's because we've got the movement we're actually just enjoying the game yeah it's kind of feel like much of a chore it didn't feel like

that was ever gonna happen yeah i think the the thing is we were moving our men around um the fact that you were sort of walking on eggshells today waiting for me to drop the hammer and do some damage to your men and then i just sort of pulled them away left you to your own devices i think that scared you a little bit left you unsettled but it kept all these ideas flowing your mind what's gonna happen next what's going on i would have been thinking that regardless but yeah i am a little confused that's that's reasonable but i do have a strategy it's um it's it's still coming together in its in its whole form but it's it's getting there so i think next week it will be more admin stuff we're going to trucks it's trucking time it's trucking time

to fuck those trucks or in this instance it's time to drive them carefully across the desert to give our men food yep during a rainstorm but i think the the admin should be interesting because this is the last thing we need to do before we've done everything bar aircraft it means we've done a full run through yeah in in theory we've done a full turn at that point because operation stages you just repeat three times in a turn it means we've done everything that makes up a full turn apart from aircraft and some of the other optional stuff like construction yeah there's still quite a lot to do but in terms of the base structure yeah we've played it we'll have played the essence of a turn through apart from stuff that we can

elect to do or not. Combat just kind of happens based on proximity whereas construction it's a lot more of an active decision to make so yeah this is great the fact that we've nearly wrapped up the essence of a turn so I'm interested to see how the trucks

pan out. That'll be good but all in all it's good it's a good time for all involved. I think the trucks might be a pain point though. Yes I agree. One they might be awkward too i think they're going to highlight a lot of the mistakes i think i've made in terms of where i've put things like supply dumps and yeah i think it's i think the roots work out

oh god i hope so but also the rain completely screws that yeah the rain has absolutely done damage to my supply routes the good thing is that when we found out um the uh the issue we'd made with the supplies that we get initially in terms of fuel it does mean that they've got more fuel to work with so i don't need to worry about them getting stranded too quickly but i i still think that just the speed of them getting there being reduced is is gonna leave some men hungrier than i'd like them to be but in terms of fuel the fuel that we've used today was a lot less than i thought my men moving around wasn't too bad the fact i managed to finish my movement in one play session alone is pretty great but that's also because i didn't do any combat and i only moved five groups

yeah so it wasn't it wasn't all that bad i just i actually quite enjoyed myself today yeah moving stuff around having that the agency to do that being in charge of my guys being up at the tippy top i don't want to put myself in the shoes of the italian fascist hiker man too much because i feel like that's a slippery slope to become an italian fashion yeah yeah and i yes i've got a black g-leon but you know i'm not i wouldn't wouldn't say it's black shirt so i think we're okay the black g-leys would be i don't know less scary the black g-leys would be exclusively geography teachers and they would be preaching ideas not places okay dangerous ideas at that but i think since we've touched on some of the game maybe we should touch on what other people

think how about that how about we delve into the thoughts and the minds of our listeners uh yeah i've got one all right do you do you hear them do you hear them coming through i love that sound effect yeah yeah i'm not gonna put it in this week you do realize i don't put the sound effects in i mean you very well might yeah yeah for all i know you're not uploading this i'm not this is not going anywhere you're just sending me empty audio files to upload once a week the first five minutes is the actual podcast yeah because then after that a little check and then it's then after that it's just me singing oh good it's just me singing the same three abba songs over and over well i'm glad the audience seemed to be enjoying

they absolutely eat it up they eat it up they love it so who have we got first uh first off we've got uh one from owen all right owen hello andy and james i'm 18 year old from ohio in the us and i've listened to every episode loved everyone and looking forward to when you two upload if you boys don't beat the game i won't have anything to listen to so i'd have to hit you with a bag of hammers keep up the work stay subtle humble and brave with sand and water owen so right that's a pretty stark warning the accountability tool now has a bag of hammers built into it which is concerning you know i quite like the the tough love approach last week of somebody buying a game telling us that we need to finish it picking apart you know part of what

we've said that we've got social responsibility to answer the pet ownership and now there's just a threat of violence so that has really covered the three corners of the triangle the stick there yeah carrot and stick sticking a bag of hammers uh yeah to be fair owen if we finish the game you won't have anything to listen to because at that point we're finished and at that point we part ways and me and andy don't speak again you'll never hear from us feel like we were never here because we'll also delete every episode from the internet as soon as we finish it yeah for the last episode you'll have a week and then we're deleting all this the most important part is the journey and uh after the journey's done and we've wrapped up that's it it's gone we will be purging the

internet we're putting a dmc strikes uh dmca strikes that will be on youtube yeah it'll all be gone so um enjoy it while you can owen it's going to be a hell of a ride keep those hammers to hand though because um we will finish it one day and at that point you'll just have to kill us both all right let's see let's see if anyone else is sending in violent threats to us hey it's motivation that's what we need you for motivation so keep it coming we've got jack here jack says hello i've been listening to your podcast for five days now found it on a reddit post and somehow i'm already on episode 11 it's very people say it's very bingeable and i i don't get that i don't get that the early ones as well especially god it's just rambling i reckon if i email you now i'll

have caught it by the time you read this well hopefully so apologies if you already answered this but i have a game question the best kind how do you decide who wins at the end of 111 turns assuming that neither of you have totally eradicated the other, how do you determine the winner? This isn't a game with victory points, is it? As an alternative suggestion, have you considered peace? That's what Common Ground's for. That's why we do the Common Ground every week.

It's for that little bit of peace. It's a bit like the Christmas Day sort of ceasefire in World War I. That's what Common Ground is. But we simply can't have total peace. Pros. You haven't actually done any fighting in the first 11 episodes, so it's really no change from the status quo to quote victor hugo quoting isaiah you have the opportunity to live in freedom in the garden of the lord walk behind the plowshare and put away

the sword loving it so far can't explain why you're addictive keep going jack well jack that's uh that's a very poetic end to that email and i think the the quote would be fantastic if the entire premise of the podcast didn't rely on us being at each other in the game so god if it was an option we never would have done this in the first place and now if we choose peace we'll be hit by hammers so choosing peace is choosing violence we really are caught between a rock and a hard place a hard place being a bag of hammers so while we do love the idea jack of settling for peace i i really don't think it's an option now because if anything we'll we might be united at that point but andy and i will then have foes we have to take on separately

it'll become war alongside a mate instead of war with a mate but to answer your question, the win conditions well to disappoint first of all yes, it does have victory points however, that's only in the instance

that there isn't an overwhelming victory somewhere else in the game so if you get your guys into Alexandria and Cairo with like a functional supply line you win uh if i mine's a bit more complicated i have to like cut it off so you have no units within a certain distance of tabrook that's right yes you need to stop me from having a supply line to any

combat units from tabrook or tripoli they need to be um cut off so that there's no supply line within 60 movement points but the the issue is that so this is for the full game by the way not the the test run the test run that we're doing it has different win conditions that are based we've talked about it a bit earlier about me controlling um different parts it's a much sort of scaled down version and there's a lot more win conditions for that but for the full game when it comes to the the victory conditions yes you need to stop me from having um any supply lines within 60 movement points uh of Tripoli and Tobruk but you can only do that following a certain turn it has to be the first upstage of game turn 35 yeah which is a long long way away yeah so you can only win

the game from turn 35 which i think is is that when the uh the germans show up i think the germans show up maybe a little early i think it might be 25 so i can't win before the germans are involved yeah whereas i can win at any time i just need to occupy like you say all hexes of Alexandria and Cairo and be able to track a supply line back so I need to hold them for a full full game turn and then track a supply line all the way back to my guys in Tobruk and Tripoli and if I can do that I've won I can do that from turn one in theory very very difficult to get my men there and hold that place so I'd be amazed if that happens however if all of that fails to transpire then yeah it goes to a victory point system and that's when it's all based around the areas that

you control the units that remain replacement points that remain basically everything you've got left in the tank as well as the places that you hold at that point yeah i also commonwealths have an extra way of getting victory points and i can voluntarily withdraw troops yes you can send them back to the western front i believe i think they just leave and go somewhere help elsewhere in the war effort because I've got some I have to do Yes, some you have to do on a schedule

Yeah, and other times I can just be like, I don't need this unit I can put it withdraw it Well you can withdraw them and then bring them back and it gets you sort of like half the extra points Yeah, they get like a point every couple turns they're away and then they lose

a certain amount of points if they come back so if they're away long enough they can come back can still be contributing to that win and the way we're sort of looking at it at the moment is that the if someone manages to pull off one of those two win conditions part way through the playthrough then they they've won they get the meal they've won and the other person has to buy them the meal and at that point the winner's determined but we'll keep on going to turn 111 for as well as long as we can try yeah yeah if it gets to the point where the game just can't be played because everyone's dead then that's it we've we've finished the campaign for north africa yeah but if it's the

case we hit one of those win conditions and we can keep playing to see if we can get to the point by system at the end and and see who wins because of victory points then we'll do that yeah we'll be playing as long as we can until we can feasibly say we can no longer play the campaign for north africa because there's no way to continue playing i do think from those win conditions if either of us achieved the other person's been smashed so badly that it's unlikely we'll be able to keep playing yeah i mean one of them for i mean for me to lose it's i have no combat units that can be supplied yeah which means they'll starve to death anyway yeah unless they hide in an oasis in which case you can track them down and kill them also then out of the wall yes they're hiding away

an oasis and if it's the case that i've got cairo and alexandria for a full game turn and i've got a supply line that tracks there your defense has been so badly broken or you've decided to try and run across the map to get away via libya then it's the same thing you've also left the wall yeah so yeah there's victory points i think it might actually be more realistic that one of us pulls off those victory conditions really i do yeah i think there might be a sway somewhere along and it just changes shift and then i think yeah someone just needs to get the upper hand and then they've won yeah i am interested to see if there is like comeback elements um there could be just solely because of the reinforcements that arrive well yeah i think that'll be a big thing push the

other person their supply lines get shorter and shorter and yours get longer and longer yeah it feels like a rubber band yeah thing i think there's definitely a chance for people to come back from bad turns. In the actual war, El Alamein is like a day's travel from Cairo and Alexandria, so it's like

that's about as close to losing as the British could get. And from there they pushed back all the way. Yeah, that's true. So, to be fair, I also don't think I'm going to send guys to try and fight that. I think it'll be a much slower march across the map rather than

A quick dart in and then dart back. So, yeah, that's the gist of it, Jack. That's how the game works. So there's victory points, but there are other win conditions. Hopefully we don't let you down by going to the victory points. But at the same time, that means you've got even more of us to listen to. Like you say, you can't explain why it's addictive. And to be fair, neither can we.

We don't know. It's probably because we put subliminal messaging in the audio files. So it brainwashes. It's all right. They won't understand us. They won't hear this part and remember it. oh good we get rid of that put them in a fugue state so thank you for that jack and thank you very much and to the others who have also sent in messages we were getting to them we are um we're

getting a little bit light on the emails actually we've actually nearly managed to trim them all down so when that is the case we'll probably work on a different segment to fill the time yeah or if you have any more questions send them in so anything that comes to mind anything based on on the game or i guess and if we've also made the vow to just read out anything really so if you've got a question send it in we'll we'll have a look at it we're not exactly structured but i say that i say that we are structured in the sense that we're returning to the history segment this week yeah this one will be a little different but should be fun all right gonna start you off with a quote as other people collect their poems and finally republish them i have

collected my travels. Travels among the ruins of desert kingdoms and the crocs and cairns of prehistoric tribes. Beyond them, among creeping dunes, petrified forests, and in places where nothing exists. No sprouting blade of grass, no worm of decay,

where perhaps in certain spots nothing ever did exist. You've been reading my diary. Not yours. Does the name Ralph Bagnold mean anything to you it doesn't but i feel like it's about to it is it might mean something to our history buffs listening but also our geology buffs okay geology is not something i thought we'd be touching on

yeah he wrote a book called the physics of blown sand and desert dunes which is a foundational text in the field of i'm gonna give this a go aeolian geomorphology all righty that's a mouthful It's the science of how the wind shapes the earth Right, okay Did not know that was some sort of study That's interesting And eventually How wind shapes other planets

As his work was used for NASA Studying the surface of Mars Okay Before He also founded the Long Range Desert Group Right, okay And before he did that He wrote and published a book

which was released on new year's day 1935 okay a book called libyan sands travel in a dead world i've read this book and i'd like to talk about it is this so this is what you've been reading yeah okay wow you went above and beyond andy this is gonna be a good one yeah so bit of context ralph was born in 1896 okay became a military engineer fought in the trenches uh in france in world war one right then he went to cambridge for a couple years got an engineering degree and then rejoined the active service where he's eventually stationed in cairo in 1925 as part of the signal corpse okay okay this book uh outlines a series of desert expeditions that took place between 1925 and 1932 culminating in the first crossing from east to west of the libyan desert

all right so this is definitely a guy who knows his stuff when it comes to desert navigation yes uh he's a pioneer of using cars for deserts which is a big thing in this campaign and some of the techniques he learned and stuff this all pulls directly into the long range desert group like this learning he's doing beforehand i feel like i'm just gonna end up more scared of the long range of desert group by the end of this uh so got another quote for you here there are deserts and deserts there is the wilderness occupied by drought resistant scrub land and occasional grass where no man's water their camels or more barren and lifeless still but dotted with wells providing a permanent sustenance for a small settled population in contrast to fertile lands its

serenity its emptiness the idea of ageless duration instills and stirs the mind in more populous rainy countries weaving romances about nomads and sheiks but there is nothing terrible about the wilderness this kind of country occupies most of the world it exists on every continent of such a type as all the country east of the nile and egypt all the way across arabia to persia and beyond very different is the great lifeless desert that rolls like a blank sheet of paper westward across north africa from the west banks of the nile the first chapters of this book and this episode will concern early sightseeing trips into the wilderness before they tackled the deep desert okay so this is uh so this isn't about the desert of my mind this is the this is terrain

what he's calling wilderness is desert it's just there's as he says there's desert and desert all of this is the word of the map of this is pretty much the worst kind of desert great that's where we spend our time yeah brilliant um so he arrives in egypt in october 1925 and he falls into a small group of brits who are wanting to go off the british the beaten track visit out of the way places uh one of the leading ones here is lieutenant uh holland who's also part of the signal corpse okay um they he catches the desert exploration bug uh further south and then brings it uh to cairo and assembles a very small group who are using cars to explore at this time the nile delta right and they discover the model t is the best vehicle for this it's light it's

relatively easy to maintain and you can get parts so at this time here's some of the stuff they're doing uh this is one throwaway sentence and it would be probably another book for someone else we visited every pyramid of not long row which stretches for 70 miles along the nile climbing to their summits and creeping down dark tomb shafts along the bats and owls so they climbing the pyramids exploring them and then we merely felt consciously and unashamed the exciting mental kick of an apparent breakdown in the flow of time whereby one sees and touches buildings and belongings perfect as of today but oddly different other people inconceivably old so they're really getting into exploring egypt and in this time he's also falling in love with the car as a means of

getting around so he's becoming a a grease monkey as well uh yeah and uh there's this real there's a bit the quote's probably too long but uh he gets this golden bathing dish that was used to bathe an infant pharaoh before the pyramids were built it's like this crazy again that like disconnection of time yeah that he's touching something so old so old yeah um but they start driving off into the hills around it finding ways up like stony crags and cliffs and figuring out how to drive on like clay that you need to drive fast across boulder strewn country like dodging bigger boulders and they also start to set up some of the first things about precautions in the desert yeah a lot of these will set up long-range desert group operating things

he's doing all of this like in his time off by the way he's also an active duty member of the army so this is his hobby yeah this is his hobby definitely so they realize if you're further than walking distance from help the order like the amount the risk of disaster has to be reduced to a second order chance basically that's to be multiple failures for you to get in trouble because you can't expect help yes yeah so no single accident can ever leave a party stranded and that's something that gets carried through the whole way makes sense yeah makes sense in this time also him and one of his friends set out to see how little water can be survived with so they walk 20 miles across the mokotamas uh which is like a hilly mountain range they walk

20 miles across that on a summer's day with one bottle of water between them why would you do that that's such a dangerous experiment yeah most of which they had to pour into a hat to give to his alsatian who insisted on following them and then sat down and started crying for water so they did it with very little water themselves so they're toodling around the region as it were until one day he's sitting in his office in cairo looking at a map and uh my eyes used to wonder from cairo to the suez eastwards across the canal across sinua which is the eastern part of uh egypt from the nile yes up to jerusalem to the great rift valley of jordan the dead sea and the gulf of aquaba tucked away in the mountains of transjordan jordan which is what it was called at this jordan

this couple at the time south of the dead sea i discovered the words petra ruins of it was not very far away why shouldn't we go and see all that this man's appetite for adventure is i i don't understand it not in the desert yeah so they start planning an expedition to petra uh him and some of his uh mates and that like group because this is 10 days they're having trouble gathering other people crazy enough to use all their like annual leave to do this of course but he does get a couple of people one of them there's this guy they want to join them and he like takes him up into the mountains in the car and takes like deliberately difficult routes to like impress him yeah but he this guy's like i'm really

interested i might get a model ford but i currently have a car i really like and then he describes it as at what instance he gets into a his car gets into an accident with the at a railway crossing and then he describes it as when he lost hospital he was badly shaken but he was ours he bought a model for two days later so yeah they leave in march 1926 heading up to petra so this is away from the libyan desert and stuff yeah there are they're learning the stuff so it takes them two days to find the ferry across the suez canal because they assumed there'd be a road to it and there wasn't oh that's just a ferry with nothing connecting to it it's like you just gotta walk there or take a camel but they do get the cars and then it's very difficult

country at the other side they cross and it's like straight into sand and dunes and stuff so to give a sense of this initial this first journey at a certain point it takes four hours to do 10 miles a baggage camel could do it in less time they were convinced as others had been for a long time that whatever else a car can do it can never tackle deep blown sand which they're going to discover by themselves later you can so they're like bumping this is like a horrible journey but they're loving it yeah these guys get off on it by the sounds of it this is their jam like to give a sense of it they've budgeted for every two or three days of travel they'll have half a day of repairs on the cars because it's just that hard going on the they're like swapping wheels out

they're taking extra transmissions and axles and these cars again absolutely hammered god these guys must know what they're doing when it comes to fixing up a car then uh yeah by the end of it they seem to be like take it apart and put it back together with their eyes closed jesus um there's this horrible bit uh with the sand where the like uh quote here the sand all looked the same but sometimes it was hard like the floor below while others one could see where the tracks of previous cars have plowed in deep so it all looks the same but sometimes your car's just going to get stuck and sometimes and there's no way to tell it for them at first because it just looks like sand so they work out the trick at this point which is the only really way to tackle this

is to just let rip and uh open the throttle up grip the steering wheel as hard as you can and try to keep the car going in roughly a straight line at speed they'd normally get to the other side of these sand drifts with the car just broadside on often being unable to hold on at the steering wheel so they're just barreling straight over just gunning it straight down there is sort of a thing of like if we don't know how to deal with the terrain it's be very careful up to a point and if being very careful doesn't work let's see how going real fast just put the pedal to the floor and just really hope it works so this first trip is unsuccessful but they do make it to jerusalem and then on to amman which is the capital of modern-day jordan yes so that whole

trip is over a thousand miles for 10 days and it cost them four or five pounds a head right because they do yeah they're just doing it all themselves they enjoyed the trip they're just determined to return to petra now they've got it like in their heads we are going there they're obsessed yeah what they are um so this is where they some of this like learning they've got starts to put in first uh they realize one of the guys on this first trip's on a motorcycle motorcycle's bad for this i would imagine it's not a good option i could have told them that you can't carry much shit and it can't cover the same ground as a car apparently and it's just annoying so they realize you need six people because you need to they need to be

able to push the cars for like quite extended distances at times yeah yeah so that means they need three cars which is when that guy who gets done by the train that's when they get him okay yeah um another thing is uh for sand um they take rolls of rabbit wire um about 20 yards long and you put that under the wheels if you get stuck so it can like grip yeah yeah but the problem is that if the front wheels don't quite get there the whole thing just wraps up under the car and they have to spend like half an hour untangling this chicken wire they can't leave behind they're also yeah there's a lot about them packing and they bolt all this stuff to the side of the cars they add rails to they've ruined these cars for anything but desert exploration at one point

there's this description of this like radiator system where because the water evaporates it like goes into another tank they've got and another tank and then when most of the water's evaporated They drive into shade somewhere And it like condenses And refills the radiator That's very good It goes back through the tanks So they make like a self-fixing radiator

Yeah, they're recycling water That's very cool And just to give a sense, this is a description of a wadi they go through Because that's one of the tiles we deal with Yes You know, wadis are valleys, basically Where, you know the You know

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade Yes That is Petra But you know that very narrow valley With like a thousand feet Yes Yeah that's a waddy So on each side several thousand feet high

Rose walls of deep red rock Seemed with basal intrusions As if pitch black had oozed up In long straight cracks The floor of the riverbed was sand Boulders and loose pebbles The rock rose sheer on either side so in the event of a rain and a sudden

spot of water, one's chance of escape with the cars intact would be rather poor so some of these are like tens of kilometres long, so if you're in the middle of it and a flash rainstorm comes you're just done

yeah, you're trapped but they do set off again for their next journey in December 1926 arriving in Suez on the evening of christmas day so they're really they're using their christmas break to try and get back to petra again these guys are obsessed yeah the wire netting i've mentioned that this

works well uh it reduces the amount of pushing they're doing but they're still pushing these cars a lot it's very manual work but they do make much better progress until they come to the rift valley and then they there's these thousand foot cliffs and they're just like well we can't get past this until they find a road that had been built a hundred years earlier going down but it had been built in such it's a three-to-one gradient uh to give you a sense of this and when they're talking about the thing they say this conqueror from the past had built a road that could only be used one way gravity is a very resolute policeman that's a phrase i like i'd like that that's a good turn of phrase so they descend this hundred year old thing and then they

have a choice of going along the coast or like much further inland and detouring so they drive their cars like along the beach but the pebbles are too bad so they have to go in the water where the sand's been more compressed and they arrive at this village and everyone at village is like what like no one's ever brought a vehicle yeah how did you drive here what the hell are you doing here and there's this bit where the official like the mayor on charge of the town is like if we'd known you were coming we would have rolled out a much better reception we would have turned the street light on so yeah they come out of here and then they come to a another waddy and they're traveling this one's 35 miles and then they come out into like a huge basin of soft sand

which is bad for the cars and holland uh the guy who got them into it yeah his car keeps getting stuck and they have to keep getting out and pushing it his car's a year older and slightly different design so it's starting to like die until eventually they reach an area where a previous army's moved through so there's like the chicken wire everywhere all right so they're like Sweet, we're going to go for it. And Holland flies off over a hill at speed. And as they crest the hill, they just see the car is just spooled. The wires got caught on the axle.

And they just describe it like the car's perched on a cushion of wires. But they still cut it out because they need the car. Yeah, they can't leave it on the car. Fix it and head on to Petra. um they rest at a valley a city a town called man for a day drive a bit further and then leave the cars and walk into petra so this is the description of them like entering petra then the gorge turned again an unseen cleft letting the sun to shine full on a great temple front facing us at the bend to us still in the dark corridor it glowed as the painted scene on a floodlit stage bright pink and

perfect with hardly a sign of erosion it looks so new as if a wealthy madman had at the front of a modern london public building carved here in a wild place for the sake of incongruity and there's a bit later on where he's talking about it makes him uh yeah i've got it uh he's talking about how similar the architecture is to like whitehall and like london uh like the fronts of the buildings and stuff and they find it like actually sinister to a sense where he's like it offends the sensibility that an unknown people 2300 years ago should have conceived it because it's like that's off how is that um so yeah they got to petra in this first journey he also has a bit where he basically just describes gatekeeping like perfectly where he's like our appreciation's

like much increased because it's difficult to get here but the guy who originally discovered it would have thought us profane for visiting in cars with like a police escort at times and we would be disappointed if we went back there now and saw tourists uh for every convenience has been arranged so it's like the well it's less difficult for you so it it's not it doesn't count which i just thought was quite funny um so this is the first journey they've gone on they've gone to petra the journey back they use the same route it's relatively simple getting back and then they arrive just in the last day and then it's straight back to work yeah because this yeah this was a this is a holiday yeah cover that for the the first part they go into the deep desert in the

next couple of chapters so well that's that's our domain so yeah that'll be interesting to see how they how they fare in the desert laying the scene there and yeah this i'd actually recommend people read this book there's some really good descriptions of the desert in there and some interesting uh observations i mean hey if you like the desert you'll love what we do anyway so may as well check out a book as well yeah it's like us but it's words yeah well quite an adventure they went on i'm uh i'm very interested to see how this plays into the long range desert group because right now it sounds like a bunch of bros just hanging out in the desert causing hijinks and some suvs yeah driving around visiting villages gunning it over some hills getting

wrapped up in wire yeah oh yeah it's gonna be wild to find out how these guys go on to become some of the most dangerous elements of the desert but the fact that this all started as a bunch of guys just you know it's like the kind of people who go on hikes yeah stuff when they're on holiday it's like no i don't want to go out and party and stuff i want to go out and hike today i want to hike for for 20 miles yeah it's that but it's like but we're also doing it through dangerous landscape and also if the car gets totaled we're gonna die yeah i mean the fact that they started this off with the whole oh well we'll go with a bottle of water oh shit we need to give it to the dog oh oh now we have no water i guess we know we're capable of walking 20 miles with no water

but fuck i hope we never have to i mean yeah it really sets these guys up for the endurance test that is that so maybe we should do that for the game we should have done that before starting the game what we should have the desert yeah we should have went to the desert and went how long can we go in the desert without going crazy let's let's try that and then maybe we'd be a bit better prepared for the game to be honest the book did make me want to visit the desert no no andy that's how they get you that's how they get you they trick you with all the beautiful description of the scenery and then next thing you know you're dying of thirst you're dying of thirst and the village didn't even turn on the street lamp for you the one street lamp oh poor guys but they

ended up becoming very scary i'm interested to see how this story unravels so we can find out how they ended up being the iconically powerful men they are in the game it's obscene how good they are in the game so it does explain how they don't need supplies and stuff like normal units yeah they're not normal men no they're super powered i think to offset the fears we we we simply have to we have to find some common ground 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 yes we simply have to get away from the deserts of their mind and back to the deserts of ours back to the deserts of our minds

I guess more specifically today the deserts of my mind because today is my common ground and as always common ground is here to unify us and today I said I you know I said I try to unsettle you played a bit of psychological warfare but now I'm going to try and find a way to better the world oh okay so this is a first for common ground it is usually it's quite bad my my suggestion my common ground is that the governments of the world should come together to create a Thunderbirds-type rescue team.

Okay. The puppets? Yes. Well, the Thunderbirds, yeah, they were puppets in Thunderbirds. But they're not going to be puppets in real life.

Okay. So what specific about the Thunderbirds do we need? What do you know about Thunderbirds, Andy? They're puppets. I'm going to need more than that. They have... I think their base is under, like, a mountain or something?

Tracy Island is where their base is. Their base is on Tracy Island. Okay, I'm sorry. What do you know about Thunderbirds? That. Right, well, this is going to be fucking difficult. I'm really reaching for the opening thing. Okay, so the Thunderbirds...

Sorry, so Thunderbirds is... It's all set around the Tracy family. Okay. Jeff Tracy, and he's a widower, and he's got his sons, and they all live on Tracy Island, and they form International Rescue. Okay. And they use the Thunderbirds, which are all their various vehicles, to avert disasters. Okay.

And they go around to rescue people, hence International Rescue. Okay, I'm in favor of this, yeah. So they've got various Thunderbirds. They've got Thunderbird 1, which is a rocket. Okay. So it sort of flies around, usually sort of suborbital. Space rescues? Sort of suborbital, this one.

And yeah, the Thunderbird 1, it's great. I love Thunderbird 1. Thunderbird 2, it's quite a big, chunky aircraft. It carries some of the smaller vehicles in it. Okay. It's green. It's probably the most iconic one. You might recognize that one.

Thunderbird 3, it's another rocket. That one goes up into space quite a bit. Okay. It's red. Ooh. Thunderbird 4 is a submarine of course, you've got to rescue people underwater yeah, a little bit less

sort of flash submarine, I feel like that one Thunderbird 4 is my least favourite and Thunderbird 5 is a space station space station? yes, they have a space station then they've got other stuff like

they've got Fab 1 they've got the Mole they've got all these other things Fab One is driven by Lady Penelope she's their London agent and her driver is Parker he used to be a thief

I wouldn't be hiring him he used to steal things so okay, I now have a grasp of the Thunderbirds so you want the governments of the world to form? yes, so they need to create international rescue

they need to create the the same organization that the thunderbirds are part of what's wrong with current rescue stuff right now there's too much stuff going on that isn't being saved you know people are people are in peril all the time and i think having thunderbirds around is not just a way to save people but also kind of a deterrent do they fight people well their main nemesis is the hood okay he's a bad guy from um he sort of he sort of hides in malaysia and he's got psychic superpowers which albeit isn't no go on it isn't a very commonly come across issue in the real world but we've got to prep for it exactly and also thunderbirds are set in 2075 so we still got time to to get to that we want to try and stop that from happening so we need to we need

to form a Thunderbirds team. So, we need to put together right now. Right now, we need to pick. You're looking wild. We need to pick which nations are going to run which Thunderbird. And we don't need to keep them the exact same,

but we need to keep the theme the same. So, Thunderbird 1. You genuinely look nuts right now. Thunderbird 1 is a rocket. It's suborbital. It travels at 15,000 miles per hour.

That's fast. It is. So we need... Who's doing that? NASA? NASA. NASA's not really a nation, but I'll take it.

America, then. NASA slash America do Thunderbird 1. Yeah. Okay, they will cover suborbital very fast rescue. Okay. So that's for anything

happening right now. Okay. Okay. Any immediate emergencies. Okay. They will cover it. Okay. So Volcano goes off.

Who do you send? Nas. No, Thunderbird 1. Sorry, Thunderbird 1. Yes, yes. Thunderbird 2. So a bit bulkier, a bit more durable, carries the other Thunderbirds.

Not the other Thunderbirds, the other vehicles for the Thunderbirds. So in this case, it would be like a car or like a bigger car. So this is just like a big plane. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, it's got like a big hangar in it.

Okay. So Oh Who's making it So the common ground is We work together I've brought the idea of international rescue to the table I need you to fill in some blanks here

Okay so you need Big planes that can move stuff around Yes Okay so the US military Right okay I'm seeing a problem here I'm also detecting a through line Which is I think every country Has this to themselves

no no no no no we can't allow that then it's not it's not going to work the way i want so we're going to take the big planes off everyone so yeah so right so we've got we've got okay hang on a minute so we've got thunderbird one is nasa slash america thunderbird two is america it's the u.s military yeah right okay fine we can do that but we need to change things up going forward okay thunderbird three as you may remember it's another rocket this one goes into space a lot now i'm seeing a problem yeah because we've already used we've already used nasa okay i feel like you really you really blew our load early there with the whole use nasa for thunderbird one thing okay china okay they have a

space program they do they do and um is it successful i don't know right right that's fine we've got global resources if things go bad with Thunderbird 3 we can rescue them with Thunderbird 1 so alright that's fine we can do that we can figure that one out so we've got a preliminary Thunderbird 3 which may or may not work

but that's fine we've already got Thunderbird 1 and space stuff doesn't really happen much nowadays which is why I'm confused that 5 of the vehicles are space related 5 that's all of them sorry 3 of them are space related

so then we've got Thunderbird 4 which is the submarine okay so we can't have NASA NASA doesn't do that one and definitely not the Ocean Gate guys they've already

had their one chance yeah I'm not sure if they've ever built shit let's face it they really fucked it so we'll go with someone else for that the Germans have a rich tradition of submarines That's true, yes The U-boat and whatnot

So we'll go with Germany for Thunderbird 4 It's my least favourite Thunderbird But I actually think it might be the best built so far So we'll go with Thunderbird 4 is Germany Now we need a space station, Thunderbird 5 I say we just bolt shit onto the International space station

We're just sticking bits on Yeah, like every country can Launch a room To be attached So we're hoping that the International Space Station is going to lease out different areas. You just attach stuff onto it. For our Thunderbird team? Yeah.

Okay. Because I don't think they're using it for much now. Oh, yeah, there's guys who are stuck there. Yeah, well, that's sort of the point of Thunderbird 5. It has ops. It sort of handles global comms and keeps an eye on things. Although I have seen criticism that Thunderbird 5 would only cover one-third of the Earth because of its radio blank spots.

And we would need more Thunderbird 5s. Okay. So that's going to be a problem. But we start with one. We start with one Thunderbird 5. We start with one. We start with a single Thunderbird 5. Okay.

And we use that as a sort of preliminary launch. We'll just have it move fast around the Earth. Yeah, we'll put some jets on it. Okay, now we need a widower and a lot of sons. Hmm. That's a dead wife and lots of sons. We can just have somebody who's a widower and then we'll pick up the son

separately if needs be. I'm now trying to pick up a famous widower. Famous widower. I know kind widowers, but I don't know famous widowers. Do you? You know kind widowers? Yeah, most of them are kind. Alright.

Okay, got one. I don't know if you've ever seen Mighty Ducks. Nope. Hans from Mighty Ducks So he cleans all the ice skates for the team Oh, so he's got the skill set

Yes, so he makes and cleans the ice skates So we'll put him in charge of International Rescue He can be the widower and then we just need a bunch of people who are sons The Baldwins

The Baldwins That's uncanny, do you know the plan? the what no the baldwin plan the baldwin plan they were going to make a live action show of thunderbirds and use the the baldwin brothers wait really really legitimately i swear to god so the people conceiving that show put as much effort into it as we as you have because it's some famous brothers so yeah so right okay so that's it that's sort of that makes perfect sense the baldwins yeah so the baldwins are led by hans from Mighty Ducks

and they run International Rescue made up of mostly US military technology. There is a problem with that though. Which is?

The most famous Baldwin is probably now most famous for accidentally killing someone. Right. But that actually

plays in perfectly. Do the Thunderbolts accidentally kill a lot of people? Thunderbirds not Thunderbolts you'll think of the Marvel property.

I think they accidentally do kill people. Thunderbirds no But there is a bit of a point of contention as to why it is that The Hood hates Jeff Tracy. And sometimes it's because it's alluded to

in the 2004 live-action film, which has its flaws, but Busted did a great song for it. So it's alluded to in that. If I say alluded to, it's explicitly said in that, that Jeff Tracy left The Hood for dead at the site of an accident.

The site of rust. That was a side You know what, the Thunderbirds could have done wonders at the set of Rust They could have swooped in there Thunderbird 1 going ultrasonic 15,000 miles per hour

The G-Force will keep the blood in this one That's not the design purpose of Thunderbird 1 It's not to stem the bleeding of a gunshot wound Okay I also, if it's any consolation, think she died instantly. It's not. So I don't think Thunderbird 1 could have

done anything about that. They couldn't have helped. Thunderbird 1 couldn't have helped. So I think in that case, yeah, we've really covered that all off. The Thunderbirds, they're going to be operated by the Baldwin Brothers with oversight from Hans on Tracy Island.

We'll keep the island. Tracy Island is still going to be the island. The one from the program. and Thunderbird 3 we need to be worried about because it might fall apart or it might not, I don't know how good their space program is that was easy

real whistle stop tour and then we can get rid of all of our rescue services so we're just leaving it to the Baldwins yes we're leaving it to the Baldwins and they've got the Thunderbirds so they'll be fine

FAB Virgil I don't know, you've clearly referenced Thunderbirds just there don't know it right, so that's what they would say that's what they would say to Virgil Virgil Tracy is one of the brothers Alan Tracy I believe

was the fastest swimmer in the world oh so which which Baldwin is that I believe he's the youngest of the Tracys, I might be wrong, maybe second youngest so whichever second youngest Baldwin

there's no way to find out it's not Alec well in that case I believe we've covered off common ground achieved we've designed international rescue we have travelled through the deserts of Libya through the past

and we've talked a little bit about the campaign for North Africa which is a game we're playing until completion so that's sort of everything we've covered off all the things we usually do and I think I'm dehydrated I think you probably are

stay subtle and brave guys stay safe out there and if you don't, don't worry Thunderbirds are go FAB Virgil speak to you next time We'll be right back.