War With A Mate - Episode 3 - History (w/Echoes of War)

Episode Date: January 17, 2025

Well it's some for something a little different. This time around, the guys are joined by the good folks from the Echoes of War podcast, Craig and Gaurav. I hope you're hungry for some history, because in this pot-luck, Craig and Gaurav bring the facts, James and Andrew bring the lacklustre interview skills and YOU bring the ears, to listen to it all.Echoes Of War : Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/@ThePacificWarChannelPatreon : https://www.patreon.com/pacificwarchannel

welcome to war with me me andy and me james there we go we did good this time yeah we had to clear out that last take yep this is take two on an intro um and we're introing something a bit different this week for our podcast we are we are we're going to take you on a trip back in time and no we don't mean to the campaign for North Africa but it is still related to that we haven't changed the theme of the podcast by the way it is still related to the game we've had some luck

in that we had a visit from two guests extremely lucky got to, well, we'll say who they are yeah, we were graced with the presence of the hosts of what was the Pacific War Channel podcast and is still the YouTube channel and is now the echoes of war podcast craig and gaurav two guys who actually know what they're talking about yeah incredibly knowledgeable and also very generous with their time to i mean talk

to two people who they have no idea who they are who just sent them an email yeah yeah we uh we came across them um i decided to do a bit of well-needed research about the campaign in north africa when we started doing this when we decided it was after we'd purchased the game we were waiting for it to show up and i thought we should probably find out a little bit about it and by chance these guys were doing a podcast series about the campaign in north africa so i binged that they've um they've just released the 10th episode of it a little while ago um we're recording this now in in 2025 it's it's the new year happy new year yes this is post yeah this is this is after that and uh yeah this we recorded this back in early december yeah because it's taken us a

tremendous amount of time to get our shit together and get a podcast out turns out it turns out when you don't know what you're doing it makes it really difficult to release stuff yeah but we got there we're here it's out we've we've released the first two episodes now so we're recording this we're going to start pumping them out and we thought we'd give a little bit of context to it because when you listen to the interview these guys uh they regularly speak over zoom calls they've got a channel that's well established they know what they're doing we don't we hadn't even released a podcast when we recorded this with them but the they were great it was a it was a fun time fired off some questions it did get cut short because i didn't realize if you don't pay for zoom

there's a time limit on the meeting so towards the end we just kind of get cut off i panic a little bit but it's it's it's good if you want to know about the history behind it which we did that's what this one's for uh yeah um if you really want to know history or uh behind it i can't recommend that 10 part series enough to get actual historical detail and insight but they provided a lot to us in that conversation and also really good at tying it into the game they took that light and just ran with it provided in insight in the both the sense of the war overall some of the more interesting rules we ran by them oh yeah and then also uh got some good general world war ii war game advice that will hopefully be able to apply

and yeah we'll be we'll be taking that with us so we're uh we're gonna we're gonna play you the the the call that we had it's it's audio only i'm afraid because when it comes to video They had some lovely backdrops that would have been great to share, but ours were so embarrassingly poor quality, we can't put that out there. Sorry, we're going to have to just go with audio only. So here it is, here's the interview with those guys, and enjoy. Record on my end, there we go. That should be it working, I believe. Yeah, seems to be on.

so uh andy we aren't experts at all in the field of history or war games but thankfully we do have the pleasure of two individuals who are well versed in history um which uh which is required i think to to give us a bit of background on on what we're trying to do here um so yeah we we have fair we have we have craig and gurev who are the hosts of the it's is it echoes of war now the channel it's yeah it's a bit of a rebrand a little bit confusing so uh i'm craig from the pacific war channel but uh for the podcast we wanted to stop limiting ourselves to the pacific war so now we're echoes of war yeah yeah yeah so um yeah some individuals with a lot more experience when it comes to history than ourselves um i uh actually stumbled across your your podcast because you did

a series recently about the campaign for North Africa, in North Africa which is the basis of the game, so I thought I'd try and brush up on my history and reached out to you guys and you were generous enough to share some time with us to give us some context

about the game itself and its historical significance and yeah, we wanted to try and brush up on our history a little and run some questions by you if that's quite alright to see if we've got

a general understanding of the actual campaign. So the campaign itself took place, this is going to be a really basic question and if I get this wrong, this is really bad. 1940 to 1943? Is that right? Yep.

Nailed it. Nailed it. Got that. So the game itself, do you know much about the game? Have you encountered of the game in in passing so until your email i had no idea that this fascinating game existed um this is really one for the for your audience to know this is like guinness book of records type of game i don't think i've ever come across a more complex and long played game in my life and i've been playing uh axes and allies which is a comparable in a small smaller scale board game

for like 20 years but even the largest axes and allies map doesn't even touch one hundredth of this thing this is an incredible uh board game made a long time ago and uh just looking at the rule set and apparently it's supposed to be a hundred turns to play this um yeah 111 um to be to be precise yeah yeah yeah has anyone ever completed this game no that that is the appeal just say one thing the only time i heard about this game was when i just briefly saw it in the big bang theory episode oh yeah yeah yes yeah every time um i've mentioned this to to friends co-workers anyone they all say oh you mean the game from the big bang theory and i've never seen the big bang theory but i have watched that episode now and yeah sheldon from the big bang

theory tries to play with his friends and they're not interested and rightly so because like you say it's 111 turns each turn is meant to take 10 hours so it's going to be a herculean task but no one's finished it um supposedly the first for everything exactly and we're going to be the first we're going to document it we're going to play it we're probably not going to enjoy all of it but we're going with it anyway it's going to take longer than the north african campaign for sure exactly yeah we may as well have went out into the desert and spent some time well as long as we as long as you know your relationship remains like how we would see the western allies relationship remained throughout the war and now not the axis forces i think then at least more enjoyable

well that's it because it is a competitive game and i'm going to be playing the axis forces which means i've got a real uphill battle uh well just remember this you have amazing cappuccino machines in a lot of numbers yeah yeah i suppose that is a benefit um so so on that on that point since i'm going to be the axis forces i've got a real uphill battle because i'm starting as the italian forces who i understand mostly from your podcast um they were massively underprepared for the the situation they were getting themselves into you know what um in terms of technology and in terms of production yes but in terms of actual uh doctrine and what they could have pulled off they technically did have the tools to win and they could have decisively defeated the allies

if they had done things right and they were trained to do it right but their leadership for no i can't even understand this for no apparent reason just decided to not go with this special doctrine that they had learned and fumbled the entire thing at the beginning i would just add to that to your point greg they already had practiced in a booklet that like detailed out a combined arms approach like what we would see in the blitzkrieg that the germans used in the battle of france and they had practiced it much more earlier and the crazy thing is marshall draziani the initial italian command at the start of the campaign he was the one who was one of the key pioneers of it but a lot of the italian command still believed in the world war one era

style of the masked infantry that's going to be the key decisive factor i mean don't get me wrong infantry is still going to be important to hold but they're not your punch anymore yeah that's yeah go for it yeah speaking of it go for it yeah i was just wondering if he pioneered that combined arm strategy why didn't he use it do you know was it like from top down sort of italian command or basically it came down to a lot it's a lot of variables but logistically his the slowest units he had slowed down all of his forces and instead of doing what gerald was alluding to a combined arms force thing that he had trained specifically for and he knew it had worked because they had used it previously in ethiopia he masked up all of his men into this like large

column put them on a very vulnerable road to invade uh the british positions in egypt and he he basically did i guess for simplicity's sake he i guess he didn't believe in uh some of his men or something it's it's actually it's very bizarre that he did what he did because he was the pioneer he had already seen the benefits of this doctrine and the last minute he just caved in and did the conservative thing so i guess for you you james uh avoid that mistake when you're playing as uh the axis uh along those lines is there any big mistakes that the allies made that you think i should try and avoid doing something relative are you speaking with regards to the early parts of the campaign like in june 1940 onwards uh yeah sort of at the start but also

in general if they mess things up later uh that'd be good to know as well um at the start i wouldn't really say so since the british army pretty much was disarmed after dunkirk and the subsequent evacuations of france they were focusing heavily on home defense and the battle of the atlantic While they started to rearm themselves, they were buying tons of weapons from America and the Dominion troops from Australia, South Africa, New Zealand, India were all being shipped primarily to the Middle Eastern theater of operations. But I would say the biggest mistake that the Allies made, which they never really fully rectified, even though they were some key political and military figures identified this, was the anti-tank gun. The reason we know about the famous 88-millimeter anti-tank gun was it could be adapted because it had a very high muzzle velocity, which allowed it to penetrate armor at distances of almost 2,000 meters. and the british anti-tank guns were woefully underpowered in comparison comparison to this which is why while and they wrongfully believed that it was the german tanks that were the

superior force to this when most of these knockouts were actually happening due to powerful anti-tank weapons and they had a similar type of anti-tank gun that was guarding cairo and suez canal which never really came under any and they were disposed as proper aa guns but the area was never under threat at all and even i remember one of the ministers of state for the region from the british did suggest that you know maybe we could ship at least half of them over to the front lines but the idea never really went that far well range of 2 000 meters that's nearly the whole length of the board itself because it feels like that thing is about 2 000 meters i'd say actually from uh from a game perspective because obviously you have to take the this into consideration it's

a board game uh i would assume the game is going to start off with the italian invasion uh where the italians will be on their own they won't have any german allies and just like in the real history the british were on the defensive because they honestly they were being attacked pretty quickly and such uh and in our history the british had done such a good job just in the early raids that they were capable of just launching a counter-offensive and just they desolated the italians and they ran all the way across the other end of north africa pushing them so i would say to the allied player if this is resembling the actual history don't be afraid to launch a counter-offensive and push no no i think i think you should be afraid you should

be afraid and you shouldn't do that that sounds like bad advice these guys don't know what the talking about well you could just just uh andrew just remember since you're playing the allies at this point in time the british have uh armored superiority the italians just had no answer to the matilda tanks they were just pretty much going through as mobile fortresses it's like bringing a knife to a gunfight well my answer to it is going to be to hide your game pieces so you can't find the tanks out about that so that's uh i i think that's probably the only way to hit i don't know why they didn't think about that during the war they could have just hit them but you know hindsight is 20 20 uh so another um another thing i wanted to ask because

the the game itself um each each turn is meant to represent a full week of um of history so So if you were to convert that into these 111 turns, is there any particular week that you think, if it aligns with history, will be the most exciting to play through? Personally, it would come down to the battles at El Alamein, which is, you know, kind of the traditional. Those are the battles everyone talks about in North Africa

because it was, I think, the real turning point when the Allies finally took, just stole the initiative completely from Rommel and his logistics collapsed. so in terms of the board game because the North African campaign was about 3 years, you're looking at about 150 weeks or so there

board game is 111 so it's a little concentrated I think it would be closer towards maybe week, I mean sorry turn 65-70 range I guess yeah, 3-4th in okay so that's about 5 years

from now so we've got something to look forward to that's the light of the end i would just say there are uh two weeks that really stand out and surprisingly it's not going to be what greg said for me it's actually the battle before the second battle of el alamein the battle of alamal halfa which was when montgomery took over so in terms of turns it's i think going to be at least uh five turns before this but the reason i love this is this was rommel's last desperate attempt to break through the allied lines and probably the only

chance he could have had because in reality montgomery was building up a lot of men and materials and he would get like this huge supply of the hundred thousand ton convoy which was around 300 german tanks to reinforce his army and this was also that first battle where the from a historical perspective i love is montgomery and harold alexander took over and they completely restored the morale of the eighth army which was pretty much on the brink of collapse they were led so badly for the better part of the year so they're not many of the soldiers like from colonel and below they just did not have any faith in their higher-ups so you know from a historical perspective i really admire that you know what i just realized uh

yeah i was looking at some of the uh the aspects of the sport game and the uh the choice to raid malta is there so in theory the italians could just invade malta at the beginning of the game and that changes everything all right james one one suggestion uh don't do the mussolini and and hold off the invasion of malta till the germans arrive yeah there's actually a rule in there you you can raid malta um in the sense of you can you can sort of bomb malta but there are rules in there to say that you can't actually invade because it states that it would be too significant if you were able to actually invade malta that it would throw the game completely out of whack so yeah they seem to have accounted for that so the the excitement you had they saw

this in 1979 when they made the game and they said no that's gonna like that it's gonna ruin the game that tingle of alternate history and maybe it's just like oh just take out malta it's all done yeah i mean there's going to be a lot of um well there's a lot of sort of really specific details that i think are partially there to make it historically accurate and partially there because the game designers were i think cruel more than anything else they had a real twisted imagination um part of it is you actually get a a piece to signify rommel so i will have a a little rommel piece and he he's sort of like roadrunner from the cartoons because he'll he can move around the desert so easily and every time he gets into a conflict he's got

more maneuverability than any other piece to just sort of get out of there um and Neil Ritchie won't be Allied Commander as well well another individual who's a named piece in the game is I can't remember, the star of Africa he was the pilot

Marseille I get him as a pilot and we were reading up on some of the rules the other day for the air combat in the game and we got into a rabbit hole looking into this guy's past this guy is crazy his history is bizarre 22 years old and what a life he lived oh yeah he um we read about it i mean you played you played ragtime tunes on the piano in front of

adolf hitler like how you must have to be a brilliant pilot to get away with doing that unpunished that is bizarre i would just want to add one thing a lot of these uh wehrmacht luffafa or creeks marinas soldiers and officers who won these various uh not only just the iron cross but the iron cross with their swords oak leaves right which is just like you know going up in the hierarchy of the military medals a lot of them did not like the nazi high command they like openly despised them marseille was one guy and i just had one thing about marseille only seven of his 158 aircrafts that he downed were fighters over the english channel rest were all in north africa yeah so he most of what he pulled off was actually in in north africa then

a lot of it was yeah well i'm gonna have to try and replicate that yeah i'll just say like you know marseille he did not really shine because when you were in the strict hierarchy of the like when he was stationed in the squadrons in northern france he would come back completely drunk with a couple of french girls with him to the base and just did not give a damn about the orders he would fly off on his own in combat and not stick to formation and a lot of the lufafa commanders could not get through it's when he moves to africa he gets that commander that's able to understand him and he realizes well as long as he does the job up in the air i don't care what he does on the ground hang on a minute i just realized that this this is just the plot

of top gun that's that's that's what the movie was based on it's this guy that's uh yeah he sounds like a real a real character i'm gonna have to get into character um maybe not you know in the sense of um supporting a nazi regime um but maybe with just he did not well if anything he did not support the nazi regime oh in that case i can definitely i can definitely take on that role then that's fine i'm uh i'm a big supporter of not supporting the nazis so yeah that that's handy um another there's another rule which i'm not sure if you've come across this if you if you've done any sort of um research on the game looked into it at all one of the things you've probably come across is the pasta rule so the the italian forces in the game this is bizarre um so every

unit needs water and fuel ammunition all that sort of stuff but the italian forces in particular actually use more water than any other unit in the game or any other faction yeah because they need to eat pasta the canned spaghetti yeah and if they don't use this pasta point if they aren't able to eat pasta because they don't have enough water their morale and cohesion levels drop so significantly that they're non-functional so we wanted to wanted to check is there any any historical accuracy in that are there any accounts of uh of italian forces becoming completely inconsolable because of a lack of pasta i would say lagos uh in a way yes just because they're not like them and the supplies aren't going to come to them they're going to the

africa quote on priority so i think from that aspect there's definitely that you have to imagine it's actually it comes from the british perspective because when they started overrunning the italians early on in the campaigns you know they came across their rations which are canned spaghetti and such and it it seemed very odd to them that this was something you know they their military would actually plan to use in war it was pretty comical because again yeah it did use water too so it was stupid especially in the desert yeah i mean to be fair i'd want some you know some creature comforts out in the desert i think yeah tinned tinned spaghetti yeah yeah it's probably the best you would get considering

the situation yeah that's it kind of beats corned beef the corned beef can's probably pretty rough i'd say but you know the thing is in the desert you never actually uh you never actually get hungry in the desert um because of all of these sand witches there oh my god as long as you don't say nannik and skywalker there i think we're good of course it gets everywhere yeah yeah it's it's irritating it's rough and that is a good way to describe this game um it's it's gonna be rough irritating um i love the fact that the guys who made this game put that in that is that is troll peak performance there well they also at multiple point in the rules say like sorry to like you as you're reading it or like why are you still doing this

i just really wonder are these the same guys that also probably you know directed the monty python movies yeah it is that vibe i think it is that sort of um 70s cynicism really baked into the game um and it really shows through the rules there's a there was another rule that we came across the other day and we i guess yeah there's a bit of curiosity on my part here because it mentions camels and the way it mentions them is a bit weird um because it says when it comes to transport for for planes you can't transport live camels but you can transport dead camels now i'm not sure what utility a dead camel has in the context of this board game is there any yeah food food maybe i mean it can't be fuel can't be ammunition so even this one this one

stumps me i guess because they were eating camels i mean this is a bizarre we've seen uh cannibalism in our other podcasts like when we discussed new guinea so i mean even guadalcanal freaking yeah yeah the last after kawaguchi yeah there is a lot of cannibals in the pacific but uh i mean you know you do eat camel meat uh you know and uh chinese fondue and stuff so i guess i guess they must have had some kind of instance where a lot of camels are being butchered or something i don't know i don't know is it it's a is it for like the australian divisions of the allied forces since at least i know some delicacies in australia today do use camel meat just one drink yeah that's true they have an issue in australia camels don't they they

brought them over and it caused like this whole thing where there's too many of them that's a very unique oh so they they have they have a just have i heard of is there like a great camel war now just ask the emu war oh yes no just just the next one right you know version two by the way this is totally sidetracking but i tried to con uh the owners of kingston general's youtube channel to let me write a whole script uh for the emo war for april fools and they wouldn't go for it i said i would do a very serious episode and make the narrator like treat it very seriously i would have watched that i would have loved that i would have loved that yeah well um the so the game has a breakdown of pretty much every every single unit that was there

there's even um stats and rules for units that never actually showed up for the the campaign they weren't there in theater but they were either sort of scheduled to be there and didn't end up there for a bunch of reasons so it's very in-depth are there any particular battalions or units that we should keep an eye out on uh you know sort of is there anyone i should be worried about that andy's going to throw my way with him being the allied player oh yeah there's a big moment for the allies when they've i can't remember when this occurred but when they had overrun the italians they pushed them all the way back churchill relinquished he took a few divisions away to go over to greece because the italians had made the amazing decision to invade greece

also and that didn't go well for them uh gareth do you remember what dimensions that was uh i'll just say one thing not to mention the italians kept an armored division of over 200 cappuccino machines in the mountains. Yeah. In the mountains. Yeah, so the Italians were invading from Albania through the

Epirus mountains into Greece. Yep, tanks in the mountains. That's all I need to say. Yeah, I don't know if that plays into this game at all, the blunder in Greece. One moment, I'm just trying to remember those divisions because i think this was at the first time at the start of the war when when they brought in

the australian divisions to replace them yeah one sec because it was an it was enormous blunder uh because the the greek campaign was going to be um a failure because hitler would get involved so those if those divisions had just remained in africa they probably would have pushed the axis even further back maybe even start invading tunisia and stuff i don't remember the unit because i do know that at the start of operation compass when the british launched a counter-attack uh o'connor pretty much had uh the seventh armored division the famous desert rats which is kind of like you know the most heroed british unit of this army and the sixth australian division and the fourth indian infantry division so initially it was the indian division that was

fighting then the green australian troops took over and then they became veterans by the end of the campaign yeah well speaking yeah i think the biggest problem i do actually have a book on the the desert rats that i've been reading in preparation to thwart and to make sure that they uh they they don't live up to their historical significance i'm going to rewrite history and yeah i'm going to tarnish that make sure that you can't get me i'm going to say one of the best allied units that were there was probably the long-range desert group yeah because they were like you know the SAS

equivalent they would be going behind enemy lines but not by an aircraft no parachutes through the desert in small motor convoys and they were causing havoc to the access machinery they

I think in one raid at the cost of one guy being injured they pretty much wiped out an Italian airbase with almost 40 aircraft destroyed and you know the allies almost had a monopoly on raiding because they had amphibious assaults upon you know some of the ports they had of course the long-range desert force going through the desert and such whereas the axis i mean during offensives of course they took key areas and there were there was raiding but they weren't as ambitious i found with their

like a long-term raid like that you know is that because they didn't have the troops or equipment for it or was that a sort of command decision I think they rather wanted to concentrate their forces in an overwhelming manner to support their main thrust so Rommel while he might have

to split his forces since he had the standard tactic of a diversion and a hook around swing and outflank the enemy so at both points you do need at least a sizable amount of firepower for their respective objectives also an issue of fuel

you have to use fuel for the motorized vehicles but i mean what else would you do with those cappuccino machines i mean that's what i would have used them for they're basically just armored cars at this point whatever the italians yeah we we even though they're officially classified as tanks yeah we just call them armored cars just by their effectiveness when you really look into it it's hilarious like the problems with the italian tanks are comical it's it's kind of crazy right they like almost uh every other tank in the theater could have a 360 degree rotating turret and the most powerful italian tanks at the time had very limited mobility so if you want to shoot you have to move the entire vehicle yeah you had to literally point your tank at the enemy

yeah when i listened to your episode of um i think it was the first or second episode of your your podcast series about the the campaign i remember hearing that part this was after we decided i was going to be the axis forces and i was just devastated that i had the tank so bad it reminded me of um of michael keaton's batman where he couldn't move his neck so he had to rotate his whole body in order to look around that's how i'm envisioning these tanks so i'm but you you are gonna get panzers later you you will have the best the like the tiger fort you will have at the end of the game i guess the arguably best tank but you'll have few of them i would imagine yeah you definitely get the best anti-tank gun oh yeah of course the 88 millimeter

flak yeah like i can't say what is used historically the allies have nothing to compare undisputed nothing you've got nothing no but he does have a big advantage over you he has the two pounders he has the numbers also yeah and servicing okay i'm just gonna ask this is there any info with regards to like servicing or recoverability with terms of your say your armored assets yes yes there's pretty extensive recovering aircraft and vehicles so um if your vehicles run out of fuel you can go and get them and also recover downed aircraft as well so and refit them so there's that whole thing of yeah keeping across the working order yeah across the board the allies you're gonna have better repair for tanks for trucks for aircraft you're gonna

have standardized parts it's so i don't know how the game will break it down but for the germans and italians it was a terrible situation they weren't using the same parts let alone even like the panzers i mean parts for one panzer to another were different also there the the train the crews for just repairing vehicles were not it was like a whole other league when it came to the allies and the americans and the british were working together either side could repair the other side's vehicles because it was all standardized so for the allies in this board game it would seem that you're gonna have you have your you're gonna be able to have your cake and eat it too compared to the axis you're gonna suffer from everything else yeah i just adding to this point of the

germans because right now they over engineered everything yeah i think the great example was the difference between the mg34 machine gun and the mg42 the mg34 when because all its elaborate looks would take about 110 manhours of engineering to just prepare one oh my god and that's because they have to make it look grand and extravagant when they finally decided to cut it down i think the mg42 could take about 50 hours of engineering and work to make which is a significant reduction but yeah the allies also have the advantage like this was the historical thing which i never really learned about till fairly recently was the country's inert motorization while nazi propaganda no doubt created that image of like you know the technologically

armor heavy wehrmacht and every lefafa they were just the absolute minority of the army yeah the germans were still so heavily reliant on horses and for transportation and the italians were even worse and this is due to the fact that before war broke out france and britain and the united states had exponentially more cars in their country than germany or italy so the pool of men who understand mechanical work who know to drive and operate these vehicles and machines it's far larger which is why they were able to create like these support groups which we mentioned on our podcast that could just come up into the field and within a few hours any long-term british tank or american tank for that matter could be up and

running do you want to swap teams i feel like i've i feel like i've got the bad team this is making me uh more excited to play yeah i can see how giddy you are i'm not happy about this not at all since it is a board game you know all of this it all comes down to logistics when it came to this campaign but this is a board game and yes it's representative of the real history but i imagine since you have the ability to raid each other's convoys and such if the axis early on establishes more of a dominance in the Mediterranean Sea, and you neutralize, let's say, Malta, then it should be you

who is on the receiving end of logistical supply lines. So, in theory, you should potentially just walk over the Allies. I would actually go as far as to say when, James, when you get the German units coming in, in 1941,

you could actually consider, like, taking some parts of your Panzer units to actually form this striking force. while it might be initially fuel expensive for you at that time around the time when the rommel arrived the allies have absolutely no answer even to the panzer twos and most german tanks until like the sherman tanks started to arrive in 1942 were pretty much uh faster better armored and better gun than anything the allies had i mean sure the british matilda was the only

tank that had a good amount of armor in comparison, but that was slow as hell. I think off-country, it could just go at six miles an hour. Great score. Yeah, yeah. This, yeah, the more

I hear, the more worried I am that I'm, yeah, I'm in a lot of trouble, but Well, it's, as Craig said, you your greatest advantage is at the start of the campaigns and all, like, you know, if we were to divide the entire north african campaign into various phases i would say you have the striking power at the start yeah and you've got to utilize that and he has the like typical to the allies i'm

pretty sure he can build up his forces far better yeah because if the board game is trying to keep to that accuracy you know he's vulnerable at the start a rule of thumb and this goes for any ruled or two board game especially with axes and allies if you're the axis your only strategy is to be aggressive from the beginning because the longer the game takes whoever the ally is is going to receive more more help and more more production because like in this case it's the british and the commonwealth so they're going to be receiving more units from australia new zealand india and such you've got the free french forces all at the end and the americans i guess will come in at the end phase of this game so for the axis it's kind of a no-brainer you just have to be quick and

decisive early on don't wait well you hear that i'm gonna push hard i'm gonna push fast i'm gonna be aggressive um i've also just realized the uh james sorry i've just realized sorry girl after the meeting we've got just over a minute left because i'm a cheapskate and didn't realize that zoom is limited to time but um but it's been great having you guys on great girl you've been fantastic and anyone who happens to listen to this check out the what will be at that point i would imagine the echoes of war channel it is it's much more informative than anything we'll ever do and it's it's really well delivered fascinating stuff but yeah thank you very much you've given me a lot to worry about um i'm gonna have some sleepless nights knowing that i'm

underprepared but at least i gotta be aggressive towards andy and it's justified defensive war at the start for me uh good to know what i'm going into so thank you for that it was a ton of fun thank you for inviting us on to this and yeah don't worry as he being the access player i'm really looking forward to seeing how your game progresses you know i'm i'm really intrigued for this now yeah yeah we'll check back in today yeah yeah we'll let you know how it goes how alternate history turns out but uh yeah thanks guys uh speak soon all right thanks thank you well there we go that was that was the interview like i say hasty getaway at the end there we uh yeah i did not realize that we're going to be limited in time with that that call so when it

flashed up at the top that i had two minutes remaining yeah did not know what to say it you panicked yeah yeah panic is definitely what happened maybe we'll future interviews will two things to take away by the full zoom thing if we're doing it on zoom and don't panic but yeah those guys were great massive thanks to them for coming on yeah they did great we did we did uh very mediocre i think in uh in terms you know what no it it was our first rodeo that's not And as a result, it wasn't great. Well, the thing is, I had my work Christmas party the day before we recorded that. I was incredibly hungover during that entire interview.

Because we're nothing if not professional. You know, it was Christmas. It was Christmas, Andrew. Okay. Relax a little bit. You've been that excuse, and it's once a year. Yeah. Well, Christmas comes around later on this year, so we're in.

What? We're on the 13th of January right now Hittling through the new year Oh We haven't done this in two weeks We should also stop time dating these Because they're being released wildly out of order Not out of order

No, not out of order, just out of time Well, thanks again to Craig and Gaurav Who were a fantastic Pair of fellows to have on Yeah, the good part of that some much needed info yeah they are that they're still kicking they're doing some great stuff and they have a youtube channel which is the pacific war channel and they cover they cover

loads of stuff um they've got a podcast which is echoes of war they've uh they've rebranded because they do a lot of broad stuff yeah they're getting all war i guess rather than just uh the pacific uh so looking forward to to that from them yeah yeah not not much of it will be relevant to what we're doing because we've decided to really bottleneck ourselves and what we're covering so i suppose it's not super relevant to uh to us but if you've stumbled across what we're doing because you're interested in history now's your chance to leave and go listen to a better podcast about history about history yeah go off and listen to these guys it's actually about history uh they've got great stuff uh they've got a youtube membership and a

patreon at the pacific war channel and you can even vote for what they cover so don't get stuck and bogged down with us we're not covering history we're trying to cover a board game we're making it we're doing a poor job of it but we're doing it and uh yeah they they were they were a grand have and and thanks for being on and we're gonna we're gonna keep on plugging away at this board game yeah i'm gonna pretend that we're into history we're gonna pretend that we know what we're talking about and to be fair we've not even done that we've not even pretended we're pretty candid that we don't know what's going on we want to learn we want to learn we want to know what's happening we want to know what we're doing like everything it'll be slowly and badly executed but

we are learning oh we're just we're just two two subtle and humble boys that's all we are i'm brave and brave well we'll we'll we'll end that there and uh yeah please check our echoes of war they're good guys incredibly generous better guys than us jump on a call with us so i mean anyone listening to this who isn't listening to theirs correct that well we'll uh we'll we'll catch you next time back to the usual scheduled program of us trying to put together how we're going to tackle this game and uh yeah we'll we'll talk to you then goodbye We'll be right back.