War With A Mate - Episode 36: Doom

Episode Date: August 8, 2025

Twists and turns at Fort Maddalena and a massacre in the South shakes up the imminent conclusion to Turn One. A fresh new history segment topic sees the focus shift to a rather unsavoury fellow and common ground has the guys looking to the stars.

do you know what it feels like loving someone who's in a rush to throw you away no well you should because that's how i imagine the seventh armored division feel right now that's what you did andy you threw them away welcome to war with a mate with me james and me andy andy you are a um a deserter i'm not a deserter oh a tactical retreat was it is that what you call it uh yeah they're still in the theater of war the conflict at fort madalena has taken a turn ladies and gentlemen has indeed we were it's over it's done it's done and not in the way that you might think so for those who are fresh into this this is war with a mate we are james and andy and we are playing spi's the campaign for north africa indeed we are in its

entirety but starting with a little practice run of six turns in the italian offensive graziani's offensive yes and we're currently in turn one off stage three we are we are we're staring down the barrel of the end this is it it's it's close to the end because all that's coming up is your movement because we finished off mine today we did with minimal combat yes i uh i left do you want to explain what you did so i uh last time you uh you heard us i had boxed andy in at fort maddalena which had became the fulcrum of our conflict so far a spot along the border of egypt in Libya. Now, this was originally the site of my primary air force. It was where a lot of my fighters were stationed at an airfield at Fort Maddalena, and Andy decided to be a cheeky git

and swoop in there. Don't you grin at me, you monster. He decided to swoop in and pick off all of my SGSUs, the ground support units that support the aircraft, killed them all, and then since, we've been fighting over that spot and last week i boxed you in boxed you in with the mileti division with the first black shirts and then the 62nd marcy mara i believe it is and you were in a tough spot because your seventh armor division was the only real division there and they were pinned by my aircraft yes they were way out of position and then the aircraft didn't help you had a few riflemen that were also hanging around trying to bolster your forces yes and you were you were in there hook line and sinker you didn't really know what was coming next

and i was thinking it was a sure thing that you were you were done that they were all written off i was pretty sure as well i mean i think i mentioned to you during the game because of the pace we're playing i moved them and then i've been worrying about it for a month yeah you've been wrestling with anxiety for about yeah god it has been weeks yeah that we've been stuck there god it's been that long that we've been fighting over this this little fort and i was thinking this is it it's written off i've got three divisions closing it on your one division plus change but what we found is that even though you're pinned if you commit no units to the close assault then you are forced to retreat three hexes and retreat three hexes you did yes

at the price of uh three disorganization points for everything involved yes uh which is quite a blow but i weighed it up and it seemed like less of a blow than losing the whole thing and the benefit for me is i actually gain organization points for winning a combat which this constitutes because as a direct result of close assault you have retreated because you couldn't or wouldn't commit any resources to it because it simply wasn't viable for you. No, I think if I had, it would have been a wipe

of one of my more important divisions. You would have been overrun quite comfortably, I think, as well. What did happen, though, is barrage. I managed to get off a barrage. I pinned Did I pin any? I did. I pinned more of them. I pinned infantry.

With barrage pin, not a bomb pin, which is different. Yes, I'd already I pinned you with my bombers and then I pinned you some more with some guns and that meant that your combined arm strength with your infantry and your tanks

would have been more or less unusable I think it would have come out as two when it should have been without the combined arms things it would have been six and with if you hadn't pinned the infantry it would have been in the like 80s or something

so a huge a massive blow huge discrepancy yeah so in the end you decided yeah don't commit anything pull away and pull away you did which left me in a position where i was considering chasing after your guys as they ran off into the desert back to the east and i have my fourth black shirts which are just a few hexes away this will be in the picture that we pop on the instagram this week for the episode to illustrate what this looks like but in the end i decided uh well the fourth black shirts can't move because of how far away they were um and when it comes to the maletti division that i was

considering pushing forward because of the distance they would have to travel it would mean they they've already committed a close assault which drove you away if they were to commit to a second close assault it would push them beyond the capability allowance that they're actually allowed to follow through with yeah so the limit wasn't you decided not to push your troops it was you couldn't push them past the point you needed to. Yes, it's an actual mechanical limitation. I wasn't allowed to. Yeah, it wasn't a choice to hold back.

So I kept them back because I could move them a little forward, but it would just be chasing something I wouldn't really catch. And I didn't want to leave more men out there, even though they could bolster the fourth black shirts realistically. I didn't want to risk that. So I'm keeping them back. However, while the push was unsuccessful, by yourself i've managed to reclaim fort madalena i have my aircraft there still i've lost the sgs

because you slaughtered them however an eye for an eye andrew an eye for an eye because down in the oasis of siwa at the very south of the game map i have arrived with my saharan detachment yes and you've butchered my sgsu that's there because well i left it completely undefended major fuck up i've made we've talked about this a bit but i've left the south very exposed and this is the first time i've paid for it in a very explicit way baron i believe is a good way to describe the south when it comes to your men completely empty not a not a site of the commonwealth down there and i've got it now i've got siwa i'm holding it and the wind condition for me for one of the win conditions is to hold both siwa and mercer matruh mercer

matruh of course was the site of a bit of a dog fight a few few uh episodes last stop stage you bombed the road near it i did and i've now got my eyes set on it because if i can hold that and siwa when this whole offensive ends if i've got both i win uh yeah i mean and that's uh the issue i have i don't have a a clean or particularly appealing option to deal with siwa no which means i very much put all my baskets at the top of the map uh all your baskets i have one basket at the top of the map and i put all my eggs in it whereas i've i've just put one egg down in siwa a lone egg the saharan detachment but that egg turns out if you hurl it hard enough you'll have egg on your face and that's what you've got my friend egg on your

face indeed uh but i wasn't without losses i will admit because when the 60 seconds finished their movement and arrived to bolster everybody at fort maddalena i lost tanks and when i say i lost tanks i rolled breakdown for my tanks and what did i get i got double sixes all of the eyes of the snakes collectively to... How many eyes do spiders have? Eight. I thought it was legs. Is it legs and eyes? Yeah, they've got...

Very uniform. Two groups of four. If they lose a leg, do they lose an eye? When humans lose a leg, do they lose an eye? Sometimes. I guess. I guess the answer's the same for spiders. Well, by that merit, maybe it's the same. However,

in this instance, it's the case that I have I've sent down that egg but I have lost some tanks because when the 60 second resolved their breakdown unfortunately there's been some loss I had 9 tow points of tanks

I rolled double 6 which means that's 75% loss so that is that's a total of 7 tow points of tanks broken down because you always round up unless you have 1 and I didn't have 1, I had fucking 9 had being the

operative term, now I've got 2 which is much more manageable from my perspective but because our good old sage matthew who is a an ardent emailer who drops us in some corrections which are well needed uh we we now know that they can limp back they can wander back to a safe spot sometime in the near future however not soon enough i fear i would love to have those tanks back right now i'm sure you would because they will make a big difference because I think towing them back is several turns, fixing them

they're out of this for a while this immediate situation, yes, they are not going to be back for a good few off stages so it means I'm out I'm without tanks realistically for them, however I now have Fort Maddalena back

you've been pushed further east and because of the fact some of them were pinned when they were moved, it means now you can't actually voluntarily move your seventh and some of the other guys no i can't move the seventh or the two infantry divisions without breaking off those pinned units yes um detaching them from your groups well they can't use more than half their cpa and they used it in the retreats yeah so they are stationary what a shitter i can't really describe it as anything else i know you've had a you've had a nightmare and i feel a little bit wry a little bit smug i mean to be honest i'm

glad to get those units out of there they're not out of there no they are still in danger i guess i'll rephrase that i came into this uh play session expecting to just lose the seventh yes i came into this play session expecting you to lose the seventh yes the fact that we found that little um uh portion of the rules that allows you to retreat by default yes where you don't commit anything and you're forced to move back is huge help we also found out something which we'd completely uh omitted previously which is reactions yes we hadn't really considered them or thought about them but when we were looking through the rules we found them and it's cleared a lot of stuff up because i was like why are there all these things mentioning moving

on your turn specifically and then it's like oh this is the thing you can do um so when a unit moves next to you you can you can respond act and retreat yes which is something that you mentioned earlier on today in hindsight you would have loved to do that i would have done that in this situation rather than go through the default retreat default retreat from not uh putting the units in yes because it's it's cost you organization points it's cost you cpa that could have been used maybe more practically um if you had the opportunity to you could have moved them in a different angle different direction i'm sure there's a million and one things that you could have done differently but we didn't realize

reactions were a thing uh i certainly haven't because that would have changed the way i navigated a few combats possibly yeah i mean it's such a big thing that if you're not taking into account you're like not fully understanding the combat i don't think like no and that's i mean that's another beauty of this practice run why i'm glad we're doing this scenario uh because we can't really have this kind of situation in the the main play because if we fuck this up in the main game that's it we've lost units we've lost a portion of the game that we would need to win the remaining nine years of the game yes nine years by the way very very generous very optimistic for our current play speed but what we're aiming for i guess which is

mad to say yeah but today again we've talked about it as well this has given us a shot in the arm more faith that this is speeding up even now because a lot of today was rule checking it was looking at retreat figuring out how that works it was figuring out all of these uh these fringe cases yeah it was completely i think if you took us take doing the rule checks out which were also for the most part double checks rather than it was us confirming that we were right wasn't us like learning the rules um but it was probably half an hour maybe maybe an hour of actual us doing stuff yes outside of rule checks um the remainder was us making sure we were definitely right with fringe cases like the retreat uh like figuring out what reactions were and whether or

not they come into effect now a lot of it was essentially seeing how you can escape from the situation yeah well i think i said to you while we were doing it uh i'm looking for the rules for a way out and you found one and it worked it goes to show that even those pinches there are ways to get out so that was a a lot of fun to navigate because it's given us reactions as another weapon in our arsenals which we'd completely overlooked so that's something we'll be able to play around with and i imagine we'll come up next off stage because it's very precarious around madalena still i've managed to take the settlement back however i've got my black shirts further east than your guys who've retreated yes you've got a division or two loitering around the area and from what

i understand you've got your eyes set on bardia i was thinking about it maybe not now uh i think this will be this upstage for me i'm not planning on any combat i'm wanting to get a lot of my guys back into the 7th, so that's a complete unit, because there's a lot of guys who started detached. And you want to bring them back? I want to bring them back, because I've noticed with the 7th, it's a really

strong armour division, but it's not had the infantry or artillery support for me to really be able to use it effectively. Which has given me the perfect opportunity every time I've had a chance to barrage or drop a bombing run with bombers.

i've been going for your infantry so that the combined arm rules fall apart and then you can't use your armor so it's left us in a fun position where we've now got a bit of a dance between madalena and bardia because bardia has a very narrow corridor between the road and a bunch of escarpments which means that if i can hold that with my libyan divisions that are currently up there then you can't really push past without a significant force although i am now going to mention something that i've been excited about and i think it's too late for you to change it so i'm just going to mention it okay uh next turn my fleet comes online yes uh and it can bombard anyone basically anyone within two hexes of the coast it can yes uh so i'm excited to be getting

them in you might want to double check the hexes that my libyans are in uh your first libyans yes i'm not going for them oh okay i was going to say if you're looking at them i've been careful with them i've done my best to make sure they're not in that range no i i have noticed you've kept that in mind but uh it does mean if i do want to go for bardia uh which is on the coast if you want to attack it if i do manage to claim it you have to worry about my uh fleet support yes but also because the fleet can move basically down the whole coast i can hit you on maps a or b as well yes which is an issue because i do have a lot of coastal stuff on maps a and b yeah and i can i need to double check i it's not just

bombarding units they can also do the bombard feature so they can bombard roads they can they can go for roads like that um they can go for uh ports i believe yeah uh basically anything anything that can be yes into hexes of the coast they can do and there's a lot of stuff around the coast would you believe it there's ports especially for some reason they put them right on the coast yeah i wouldn't have done that tactically no i would have put my important ports way off like in the middle of the desert probably well you put them down to the south on the great sand sea you do a different thing yes because you don't have i've noticed that actually the commonwealth have a massive floor they don't have boats that go across sand no they wouldn't invent that till

the 60s after the war oh i see is that one of your history segments yeah we'll be doing land submarines nerd i'm i'm very excited to see how this pans out because it's become much more of a game than it was a long time ago when we started this off in the first upstage it was us fumbling around in the sand yeah it feels like i'm not wrestling with the game anymore i'm competing with you yes which it didn't actually feel like i'd say during upstage one oh god no during upstage one probably most of the way through upstage two yeah i would say so i didn't feel like you were the biggest threat if that makes sense no the biggest threat was i put something somewhere and then i've misunderstood the rules and it's vulnerable or which i have to move it back or

yeah we've we had a lot of mistakes like that um but now it feels like good enough grip of the rules that it's now us using the rules against each other yeah i mean we're playing a game today you being able to get away i was like damn you've made a good move there it's a tactical decision you've cost yourself organization points you've done it in a suboptimal way but you've got away yeah i i've kept the division weaker rather than not having the division exactly which is what i was expecting to come into today with to be honest yeah i i was i was thinking it's a sure thing that you will be losing men today because of the pinning because of the positioning of the fourth i thought that was a good fallback that you can't really go further

east as a retreat without things falling completely apart well we had a rule clarification for that that was very important which is a unit has to end the movement segment within two hexes in order to be able to move again during the same phase uh but if a unit like retreats into another unit's 2 hex range, that doesn't suddenly give them the impetus to move, which was an important thing we had to look at in terms of retreats and what would happen there. Yeah, that was a thing that, again,

the retreat really spelled out for me because for a while I was thinking, how does this mechanic work? It shouldn't work, but it is because if you factor in retreats, it makes perfect sense. another part of the game that we've overlooked um i did find an error today in the rules didn't i oh yes a case number yes a case number error and we don't come across these as often anymore because we've read through all of the rules we've now come to grips with them and it wasn't an

important one it's me nitpicking if anything i feel i feel maybe even bad at this point because i've come to have a certain a certain level of respect for the game which is it was talking about the win conditions for the game and it said they were in 60.71 they're actually in 60.81 so that was when i was looking at siwa and mercer matru being held that's when i determined that so a small nitpick not quite in my angry rule addenda maybe in my my more calm and accepting just a rule addenda not a not ones that make me want to fucking scream yeah but all in all it's been a fun session that has moved the pieces around in a significant way and i think has really poised the game to play out in a way that i hope it does for the main campaign which is that

it's not flash in the pan action it's slow glacial movement which i think will give the game a lot more fun and tension yes than blowing each other out of the sand which is also matching with the research i'm doing for the history thing where it's like a battle might be a month yeah it's not i'm gonna not gonna lie i was going in with almost like the medieval perspective of like they sort of line up or meet at one place and then it's like a decisive day yes that's what madalena looked like for yeah well i think all of last week it looked like that yeah but instead here we are with a renewed sense of understanding and it turns out no the game is it moves slowly and rightly so because if this started to go any faster i'd probably have a panic attack

thinking that i've blown my load and there's no way to realistically continue with these strong units if i've expended all of their capability all of their ammunition and then you poise for a counter-attack, that would push me further west. Yeah. So, right now, my focus is on Mercer Matruh. I need to hold that northern corridor along Bardia

and then push along the road. Which is also my entire focus, is holding that north bit, because that road is... Because of the way movement works, if you can get a foothold on that road, you can strike incredibly deeply into, like, enemy

territory. It's paved with gold. yeah road it's perfect it's the perfect leverage point so i think our focus is probably going to end up there over turn two yes uh absolutely and i will one thing i really started to appreciate today i think we've probably got the same thing yes uh the cohesion rules absolutely uh yeah getting more appreciation for them seemed like a really elegant thing and like you can push your units and if they win a fight they get it back yeah i'm not sure if we talked Talked about it much, actually. Because you get free organization points if you win a fight.

Yeah, you start at a static zero, and it can go up or down. The maximum it can go to, I think it's 10, plus 10 is the maximum. Yeah. And it goes to a potential negative 26, at which point your unit is essentially completely dysfunctional. It's done. They can't attack willingly. They surrender on contact with air, essentially.

You end up with a unit that doesn't function. and if you win combat you yeah as you said you get an additional three cohesion if you uh have to retreat in certain circumstances you lose cohesion if you push people over their usual cpa they lose cohesion which is where i think the interesting thing comes in uh for me balance is you can push people past their cpa allowance like you're pushing them harder yeah uh and that has a cohesion cost but if you think you're going to a fight you're going to win or even better for you if you've won a fight previously you burn them off separately from cpa yeah like a buffer uh which makes it an interesting thing of like do i want to push these units into a fight and then

they'll be worse off in the fight yes or so i think that is a very interesting mechanic that i'm starting to appreciate in a way i think i didn't before this session yeah the way it works it actually flows very very well in the game so i'm interested to see how that pans out across a broader scale of the game over a longer period of time because now it does seem to be balanced yeah because i don't know about you but i've been pushing a couple of guys into negative or pretty close either hoping they win a battle or being like you're more useful one hex across as it were i've been so i've been quite uh reckless i think with mine where i've pushed them but i haven't been looking at it from the victory standpoint i've just kind of went this is now the value

they'll have so i'll take it yeah so when i got that today when i pushed you back without them having to spend ammunition i've essentially traded capability points for ammo for ammo and also to gain cohesion when they won that conflict against you without firing at you so it means in the end they've actually just got a net positive yes because they didn't have to overexert in order to get that so i've ended up with some guys in the pretty much the entirety of the maletti division has now plus three cohesion which is massive actually like it gives them that affects morale and it also gives you that movement buffer yes you ever want to push them i've got a stop gap now that i can fall back on it's a safety net which is going to be very useful to hold that

area it makes the whoever's got it more like dynamic yeah exactly you've got more uh boundary to bounce off on either side because you could sort of do the plotting thing where they win fights and they never go over and they gradually just get to a point where it's like this is a hardened well trained division they have a morale boost on anyone

they fight the two big things that stood out to me are infantry being able to move a lot more and also guns being able to both barrage and close assault after moving which for me is because I fucking love a barrage

I think it's your favourite mechanic barrage is my favorite mechanic yeah there's something about it i just love it i love the idea of just sitting your guns down and just blasting the guy from across the dunes tearing apart that stuff pinning down a unit and it's worked wonders today oh yeah even today i think it probably played some level of uh impact on your decision i would presume oh massive um because if the in that initial thing if you hadn't pinned the inventory it would have been much more a toss up in my head of do I just go

for this here? Yeah because you could have taken out some of my guys It wouldn't have been complete victory on my side, I would have came out with losses I mean if you hadn't pinned if you hadn't pinned the inventory it would have been within reasonable

dice rolls for one or the other of us to win I would have got lucky but it wouldn't be like crazy yeah my numbers would overwhelm you you would lose the most men out of this whole situation but you could still take away a chunk of my division

either the Mileti or the 62nd you could have taken the 62nd have just lost 7 tanks you could have taken away some infantry as well there could have been some losses what I was weighing up was like is it worth losing the 7th

my big forward division to cripple 2 of your forward divisions and i think it would have been in my head i mean i think i would have gone for that if you hadn't pinned the inventory because i think another thing is the seventh while they're not there right now they are still here they're still in the area yeah not out the woods they've not become irrelevant and also uh what i've been working out for my movement is i won't be doing any combat in my movement phase next session i'll be consolidating the seventh yes you're trying to make them an actual force my plan is to put i think it'll end up being maybe two or three infantry in there

and maybe three or four guns which means all the tanks can go theoretically with the combined arms rules and i can also start being like what am i gonna pin what am i gonna try and take out the fight so uh by the end of turn one uh the ending bits of upstage three that we're going to do next yeah um i'm hoping for the seventh to become much more of a autonomous fighting like i can throw them into it i don't need to be worried about like infantry battalions being near them so they can support yes which i'm i'm not super nervous about because i've got a lot more divisions sitting around than you do in that area yes but all in all it's it's give and take and i think when it comes to the forces i've got committed there i'm

happy with what i've got garrisoning um bardia yes and i'm comfortable with what i've got along that border all the way down to siwa because i've got the saharan detachment there and there's no one else to compete with them so i've got a very comfortable position now i feel a lot more confident because i'll admit when you took madalena i was convinced i've lost the scenario i was sat there thinking i've actually fucked it and i've lost this whole thing that's kind of what i was thinking of it as is like this is a decisive blow to get rid of your air superiority and it really felt like it um but you did have air reserves and also and they did some damage this offstage it was probably if it had been a flat division for six sgsu's worth of planes

it wouldn't have been worth it yes like i'd rather have an extra division and you have more planes yeah the trade-off is uh a difficult one to navigate at the moment because we haven't seen a play out over multiple turns yeah but so far so good uh how are you feeling about the current situation overall uh overall extremely positive i'm enjoying the game which god yeah doubtful um i think i'm on the back foot scenario wise but that's been fun thinking about yeah like and the planning and like learning from the mistakes we're making in this so the fact it's pendulumed in a single upstage goes to show how quickly you can turn around though

yeah you can pull this back i could double down there's so many ways this can go already oh yeah i guess there's two ways either you win or i win but the ways in which the ways we get there are like because will that down south seawolfing be incredibly relevant or will it be completely not yeah is that something that's happened now but it doesn't actually affect the game is that something i should be spending next turn and maybe some of this turn sending units down there or my current thinking it's only valuable if you have the stuff up north exactly exactly and right now i do not have any near chance of getting that without clearing out the entire of the north corridor which doesn't happen in next op stage i can tell you that

so but that's that's where we are now that's that's a recap of what's happening currently and it's it's it's genuinely fun oh yeah and i didn't imagine enjoying the game it's fucking wild that we're enjoying the game i had a fun time today and they actually enjoyed the game No, it was a fun one. And part of that, I think, is down to my company, and you're very welcome for that. Cheers, mate. Yeah.

No worries, man. You're welcome to it any time. Any time we're playing this game, I'll come round, we'll hang out. Just don't message me outside at hours, you know? No, I know not to. Yeah, I'll not be pleased if you do that. Get a hold of yourself.

Don't get in touch unless it's about the game. Speaking of getting in touch... Oh, that was fucking smooth. All right, then. let's have a little look and see what we've got in the mailbag andy over to you yeah i'll uh hit you first this one's from joe he sent it through the web form on the website so uh hi there gents i found out about the show through one of your reddit posts and i've been really enjoying hearing you guys wrestle with the process of learning the game and indeed coming to terms with what you have

committed yourselves to my brother and i are currently playing a hex encounter war game albeit one far less complex rising eagles australis 1805 and your struggle in recording rules to reality are deeply relatable to us both uh i just finished episode 23 so i'm not caught up but i feel compelled to message you to say that i fully endorse andy's proposal to build huge confusing stone monuments for the sole purpose of gaslighting who or whatever comes after us while i understand james is concerned that we might be remembered as a bunch of slave masters who forced untold farsens to build the sphinx of kent or various car park henges i think the ship has sailed on uh that bit of our legacy agree we are as a culture not exactly morally

upstanding we might as well have a little fun with our defendant descendants and confuse the shit out of them even if it means they think we enslaved people i also wanted to add my voice to the clamor for merch put subtle humble brave on mugs and t-shirts and shit and i'll buy all of it along with lysives matte ponchos you guys deserve to make a bit of cash for this ridiculous project you've undertaken i'm looking forward to sending spending the next decade or so with you guys journeying through the deserts of your minds certainly humbly and bravely yours, Joe

well, Joe if you want to send us some cash, stick it in an envelope post it straight to us, we'll send you the PO box personally doesn't matter the currency, just stick it in an envelope we'll exchange that afterwards you don't need to worry about that, we'll figure out a way and thanks for the support

and the confusing stone monuments yeah I mean, my concerns were highlighted in there and in the end it was common ground we found it we found that that bit in between we found that safe space so all in all i'm fine with it i think when it comes to the stone monuments we need to leave some sort of legacy and i i agree with joe we've kind of fucked it we have so let's have some fun yeah not as personally but yeah in the words of lady lady gaga said let's have some fun this beat is sick i want to take a ride on your disco stick

the disco stick of course being a large obelisk in the middle of coventry yes naturally that is where the disco stick will be so joe the poker face is just lying about history to the future yeah you know what lady gaga has really hit the uh war with the may law yeah and good on her she's a big fan by the way um oh that's good to hear yeah she's emailed in as well but we'll get to that later because you know we just do them in order for the most part unless it's about heathcliff then for some reason they take priority as for merch all right so addressing the merch thing because we keep on saying we're looking into it we have committed a bit of time in the next few weeks to look into this because we found at the moment we've got everything nailed down for the

us stuff the shipping is reasonable we've got that sorted we need to sort out the uk stuff and the last thing we want to do is put out merch that's available but only in one part of the world and otherwise you'll be charged out the eyeballs we don't want people to be put in that box so we will be looking into that soon joe we promise and everyone else who's been listening the poncho thing we're really struggling on i don't know that we'll do that anytime soon no that seems like we need custom poncho makers and they're not easy to come across ponchos are hard to find in terms of drop shipping stuff yeah would you believe it they don't have them preset but stuff is coming next few weeks uh hang on guys we are we are going to put something together

we're just going to make sure it's relatively fair for everybody to be able to get them shipping wise and for cost we're trying to keep them to a minimum so that people are paying out their eyeballs for what will likely be something designed by us so it's not going to be amazing it's just going to be charming but i will say as impractical as this going to be the poncho is gonna happen at one point because i want one yeah there's gonna be at least two ponchos there might be more available for people who aren't us who knows but um when it comes to you you're playing a hex encounter game with your brother uh kudos because before this i would never have touched any of these games i only i only started this one because i i fetishize anything that's

unfinishable or undoable um when it comes to any sort of hex encounter game i i have an inherent respect for us so it's good to see that you're you're part of the family joe and you're bringing the family in you and your brother so i hope the game goes well and thanks for supporting andy's psychosis when it comes to his common ground segments and uh yeah merchant bound we we promise we promise um so thanks joe um cheers we've got a message from neil what's neil gotta so uh well the the subject is house of doom and this is a this is a great one because it relates uh to again house of leaves my favorite book as you all know by this point howdy gents um so uh what what neil does say is that this first bit isn't for the podcast however i'm

going to read it out um because it's because uh this is something that is i think it's personally interesting and it's not anything personal um for neil he's not divulging any personal secrets but he says it's related to the recent mentions of high literature and not suffering in the desert mental otherwise if you like old school doom take a look at the my house.wad doom 2 mod sorry for being cryptic but it's the best one if you go in blind um i'm not going to get too much into it neil i agree this is a doom mod called my house and it's actually how i found the book house of leaves if anybody is into playing doom or doom mods check out that game i won't give any context look it up it's incredible um so yes i do know about it neil

thank you for sending it in it's actually how i found the book in the first place i love it it's fantastic um just wanted to put that out there um changing gears i appreciate the suspicion i would love to be the owner of the heathcliff ip but alas i am just a fan of weird projects Neil, sorry, I'm only just realising you're the person who also messaged about Heathcliff. I didn't realise you're the same guy. Wow, you and I are the same person. Why aren't you here instead of Andy, man?

Come on, Andy, shuffle off. You need the contrast. We should be doing this. Now onto something that can be for the podcast. I would like to propose a house rule. Each player gets a camel herd token that can move the same number of hexes as the slowest infantry. Each herd starts on the furthest edge of the board from your opponent.

and requires no upkeep if a herd occupies a hex that contains any sort of combat the herd dies and is replaced next shipping phase back on your edge of the map the objective is to do a tour of every major village on the map with your herd you must stop in each village so no just passing through why bother moving the herd same reason you bother playing the game it's fun hopefully subtly humbly and bravely yours neil i do like that as a a humble rule just you need some guy to be exploring visit and stuff it doesn't seem to be that war related yeah i think well we need to do something with the fucking camels and we still don't know what so you know what neil you're as good as anyone when it comes to suggestions because i like this idea of yeah it's kind of

like moving a pawn across a chessboard you get them to the end maybe you get some sort of prizes at the end yeah for the camels visit every town in libya and egypt they become panzers or rommel splits in two and there's now two of them oh i don't want two rommels he's like the worms in the film evolution oh no it's a bit of your personal lore i didn't want to bring into i'll not get into evolution i'm not going to go down that rabbit hole no no they're not ready for that so um neil i think you might be onto something with these uh these camels because we do need to implement something at the end of all this when it comes to the finale of the game when we release our own addend to the rules the camels need to have some sort of purpose well

that's the last common ground it is it's what happens with what happens with the camels and it's going to be a whole episode it is it's going to be the camel episode it's going to be the coda on this project um but yes uh when it comes to uh my house check that out and when it comes to neil thank you because we need to do something with these fucking camels honestly oh right you know what there we go that's a whistle stop tour on the mail because we've got we've got some history to cover we do but if you do need to get in touch or want to get in touch there's probably no need to but if you have that itch then the way to get in touch with us is info at war with a mate dot co.uk or our instagram which is war with a mate our website is also war with a mate dot co.uk

and we've got a web form on there so fire it away on any of those methods and we will get back read it out um if there is anything you don't want for the podcast uh just fire it over but when it's something as interesting as that i will bring it up because it relates to stuff i love and i think everyone should check out stuff i love uh so i mean you phrased it weirdly but yeah yeah share what you enjoy sorry that's a better way to put it that made it sound a bit hubris filled and egotistical maybe even narcissist uh fueled but um no check out what you love and encourage other people to love it andy what about what about history what about indeed let's do some history this is i'm excited because i don't know what this is going to be oh no you don't i don't know

what you bring into the table here okay we left the maori last week and i was touched massively by the maori who are we looking at or what are we looking at this week i've got no idea what's coming now we're on the other side of the conflict oh dear and we're doing a guy right who is the guy uh this name you might know okay it's hallo uh balbo i don't know the name it's not ringing the bell it doesn't know okay uh because it's been mentioned before uh we'll start with the end i guess because it was mentioned uh this was the guy who got shot down with friendly fire uh graziani's rival oh yes of course during graziani's rise to success yes the man who was mysteriously destroyed indeed uh italo balbo uh times magazine cover feature wow

one of the quadrant of fascism the governor of libya and the grand air marshal of italy okay so he's got a lot of titles if they've got a lot of titles i've come to become suspicious of oh come to become oh my god what's going on oh i'll admit i've uh i've had a few i've had a few brewskis today so my uh my my coherence uh my cohesion level is dropped a little bit it would seem but we're gonna start with his early life but just set a tone uh here's the quote and this is from the man we're featuring better to destroy uh better to deny everything to destroy everything in order to renew from the ground up controversial quote yes interesting opinion so on the 5th of june 1896 balbo was born in ferrara in the northern part of italy uh at this time it's

the kingdom of italy uh he was born in the schoolhouse both his parents worked out uh worked out as teachers okay education man uh kind of uh he was described by people around him at this age as undisciplined and restless but smart and charismatic i don't like how close that is to me yeah uh his father his father would recall the family's military history uh various members of the family are involved with napoleon's there's a rich military tradition in the family and he's also completely obsessed with adventure novels at the time okay his family is deeply politically divided his dad's a monarchist his brother's a revolutionary syndicist and his other brother

who balbo agrees with at the time is a republican not in the american sense and we shouldn't have a royal family sense right okay yeah they used to have like knock down drag out fights in the family home about this stuff the only rule was you couldn't bang on the dinner table during dinner that was a step too far i like that they've got a code yeah it's nice to be lawful evil so when balbo's 14 he lies about his age to join an expeditionary force intended to join an albanian revolution against the ottomans which is an incredibly specific and political thing for a 14 year old to be involved he sends his mum a letter which he receives the next day like outlining all this uh but the exposition expedition fell apart and got turned

back on the border so he's back home a few days later after having been like i'm going out i'm doing it uh he's described at this time uh and this is the first time he's described it but it fits sort of throughout his entire life he doesn't view politics as like a collection of social issues or movements like how much the working class are played unions that kind of thing he sees it as like an adventure or a crusade in the name of patriotism so he's got a very like somewhat romanticized view of politics and yeah what it means uh as a student he led a strike at a school to try and get extra holidays you know what i i went to school with this guy i went to school with i was thinking this when i saw the he joined up for a bizarre military expedition when

he was 14 i was like i was picturing the kid who would have done this yeah i i knew like a group of them so he tries to find a form of student strike to get a new holiday and his dad goes i've had absolutely had enough of this and sends him to school in milan which is the same city his seven year older brother uh lived in and was politically active so like a 15 year old balbo uh started going to meetings and even writing in uh local newspapers okay well he's getting a bit more involved at least he's got a passion yeah he does well at school uh once he's sent away uh and when he's 16 his father sends him to study in san marino where he has very good grades through high school up until 1914 which i'm not sure if you know a fairly interesting time in world history

Yeah, I believe something happened around that time, something global. Indeed. He's politically active at this time, and he meets Michelle Bianchi, who will be another one of the four quadrum who do the March on Rome and become, under Mussolini, the top layer of the fascists.

Okay, so this is the forming of that little corner of politics. Yes, fascism doesn't exist at this time, necessarily. a lot of the ideas that will grow into it do but fascist as in as we know it you know where the word fascist comes from i don't actually know not the etymology the roman bundle of sticks with like the axe sticking out have you ever seen that yes yeah yeah uh that was a fascist or something like that but basically that was the absolute rule of law for rome so if someone held that oh wow and that's where the word fascist comes from is them using these old symbols right okay that's that's quite cool actually yeah um so you and yeah things are kicking off in 1914 italy

yes and globally um balbo is very much in favor of intervention uh italy's neutral at the time but balbo and mussolini who he is getting rolling at this time uh and the various people who will become fascist leaders tend to have a interventionist stance they want to get involved in the war against austria who's technically an ally of italy well yeah it's got things got dicey didn't they yeah yeah he starts giving speeches at this time sort of regionally but what he's mainly involved in is street fights and beating up people who disagree or heckle other people's speeches or if a socialist tries to give a speech what happened to that plucky kid who was writing for the newspaper this this is what happens when kids are too into politics they become violent thugs in

the street yeah so yeah he meets Mussolini at this time and he's regularly seen around uh mostly in these newspaper offices okay right and eventually him and the interventionists get what they want and italy enters the war in 1915 right okay yeah he joins the italian royal army he's overall sort of a competent and enthusiastic soldier but doesn't fly too high although speaking of flying uh he does uh apply to get flight training don't do it kid because he's always dreamed of flying and he also he grows bored with going on patrol and sitting in trenches so he does get accepted to get flight training on the 16th of october 1917 two days later the Austrian and Germans make a huge push into Capitino which is a famous battle

and he has to return to his unit before he gets to fly at all or what's left of his units I should say but in this time he does get promoted to lead an assault platoon and he's obsessed with pushing his men it's like these adventure stories these like heroic patriotic stories drive him so he's obsessed with honor and like that kind of achievement so he's pushing his men on more and more dangerous missions they're like attacking larger groups and then he fights at the battle of Mont Grappa which is a three-phase battle on the Italian border between them and the austrians and the germans and then finally just the austrians the germans sort of fall off around this time yeah that's what i hear so this is where 70 of italians who die in this war die

on the hills of mount grappa oh jesus i did not know that yeah so his platoon ends up it's several hundred men by the end there's 17 men left him and the survivors survived by playing dead in a shell crater oh god and then waiting for cover of darkness and getting out of there so by the end of the war he's picked up two silver stars and a bronze star which are yeah ranks in the gym like medal of honor that type of thing yes yeah but um and so he heads back to florence to finish a law degree which he'd started before world war one right um this time however he's a bad student something's changed uh he's gone from breezing through classes to like he barely barely passes this although he does meet the woman who will become his wife countess emmanuela flor florio

a countess yes uh he would cheat on her a lot okay but they did stay married he seemed aside from the cheating a relatively good husband by all accounts i mean that's a big it's a big aside from you have to really cut a big chunk off but he is relative to other high level fascists like mussolini's constantly fucking people like he's cheating on his wife like a respectable amount for the time and social circles he moves in wow at this time his world view is pretty unrefined it basically boils down to two things he's very patriotic and he hates socialists we know he hates socialists he fights them in the street indeed he does uh which means he's extremely pissed off when he's returns to

ferrera uh in 1920 which at this point is firmly and outwardly socialist oh dear to the point of uh the day of rest has been moved from sunday to monday the hanging red flags uh from the churches and the town hall uh this year uh comes to be known the two red years in italian history where as well as a uptick in socialism communism is also an uptick in violence so he's back in his hometown now and the fascist party have been formed now and his town quickly gains 200 and then like a thousand members before the end of the year but he doesn't join yet and In fact, at one point, he gets into a public argument with a group of fascists, and they threaten to beat the shit out of him very publicly until he leaves.

A month later, he's a member of the fascist party at the age of 25. Oh dear, you've radicalized a fascist. Yeah, under three conditions. Okay. He gets a salary. Okay, yeah. He gets a job at a bank when the fascist fight is over. okay so basically when they win he wants a job as a bank inspector

which seems low-hanging fruit from what this guy's gonna do this guy really comes out aces yeah uh well that's also i think his wife marries him and she's like because he's a loser at this time sorry i was i just love his wife marries him but she like keeps believing and he's gonna do better and better and seems to push him her father hated him until he died even when he was the second most powerful man in italy her father was like this guy sucks he keeps cheating on her yeah so yeah at the age of 25 he joins the fascists and then this is when he gets involved in the black shirts and founding and running in them oh which we'll get into next week there's one last thing to mention

for 1920 before we move on yeah uh during this time he joined the freemasons oh no this guy is ticking every red flag box yeah oh like this is this is the worst kind of guy you could meet at a pub oh that is what this guy is like the worst guy you could meet at a pub but then has a knack for violence and takes over a country so uh yeah we'll go into the rest of him but this is the the setup for him uh well i i have a funny feeling i won't have the same poignant release i will at the end of his history segment that i did with the maori well no we know how his ends well yeah but i don't feel like i'm gonna have any sorrowful thoughts when he's shot down from the sky i already and i'm sorry to say this to somebody i've never met and can form a personal

opinion on i already don't like him very much no he's not a nice guy he's uh yeah he's not a nice guy but not in the way of graziani graziani seemed like a psycho this guy seems like the most annoying kid in your school was given everything he wanted yeah this guy seems like a sort of spoiled obsessive who's also cheating on his wife and is a violent thug i also think in the 1920s the like late 19 teens all these people are writing in fucking newspapers like mussolini all the people who'll become high-level fascists it's like the equivalent of social media the press of the bad guys well he's got a newspaper column it's the equivalent of like a right-wingers podcast but that's the same like level of cultural i mean the fact that i've compared myself to him

in terms of being charismatic and then now you've said that he's got a podcast he would have a podcast it wouldn't be war with a mate no it would be a war against them oh yeah yeah he's a he's a he's a bad guy by the sounds of it but i'm interested to see where his endeavor takes i know where it takes him it takes him to a uh a fiery death from the skies yeah but uh boy does he set fire the world before he dies well i'm interested to see where good old balbo goes because sounds like the guy is uh on a one-man mission to cause havoc yeah this is the nice part oh my god you've not said anything nice about him apart from the first few minutes he hasn't killed anyone oh yeah he's also writing for newspapers this whole time that's

okay okay well all right yeah okay we'll we'll we'll get through this guy this guy is going to be less sympathetic of a character it would seem yes uh but yeah uh we'll find out some more info about those uh black shirts of yours while we uh find out about him i look forward to it i look forward to finding out more about my guys my guys have caused you quite a bit of havoc over the last few weeks yeah and it makes sense why but we'll get to that i'm sorry that i've caused that havoc andy i don't know if there's a way you can maybe forgive me i don't know are we too far gone i don't think we're ever too far gone do you have something that can bring us back maybe a little

bit of touchy-feely i was really hoping you'd say common ground oh yeah sorry common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground i'm trying to intro the common ground i'm recording maybe there we are so our common ground this week it as always is an opportunity for us to come together and find a bit of solace in amongst this conflict we've pushed each other away to dandy i've pushed you away from fort maddalena you've pushed me away from my comfort zone a little bit by talking about somebody who's just quite frankly a nasty man however what we can do now is bring it back

a little bit and agree on something hopefully uh a middle ground in a topic that i will decide and as i say i'm a little bit socially lubricated today so i've decided to snipe this one out there from the zeitgeist of the current state of affairs of the world and i've decided what we should do andy is we should give up on space we should give up on space and we should just fix the here and now i think we should have a ban on anything space related until we fix earth i'm in favor of this well it's going to be very short common ground yeah unfortunately but uh i guess what's your what's your logic here so my logic is we're doing all this stuff right we're well i say we i'm not lumping myself in with this we um you got your elon musks you've got your nasa's you've got all

these people who want to go out of space and they want to go to the moon they want to go to all these different planets they want to go to the asteroids they want to try and figure out what's going on out there why we don't know what's going on here we haven't got it figured out yet okay walk before you can run is what i'm uh i'm looking at with this i think we need to figure out here first okay we need to patch together earth we need to figure out what's going on there's too many bad things going on andy we need to stop the bad things before we go into space otherwise we're just going to start contaminating the moon yeah i mean i i agree with the that uh do you not think there's anything inspirational about

going to space a sort of collective effort of humankind to push its borders i guess if you can point to one thing about going to space that's ever been collective and hasn't been a war between nations but we've only been to space for one time and it was the cold war see my issue is looking at all the space stuff it's always competition it's always what i want to go there first i want to do this bigger it's never oh let's all do this the only way that that could happen is if we're doing an armageddon style thing i do think we should be going to space okay what now yep okay let's go let's hear it i do i don't think private individuals should be

allowed katie perry we brought her up last week she went to space yeah that's not allowed yeah okay yeah we definitely strike that off basically billionaires should stop building rockets yeah i get nervous when billionaires build rockets because i'm thinking what i get nervous when they don't explode well yeah i'm thinking what right so if they're building rockets where they're going they're fleeing yeah that's what i'm scared of i think they realize what's happening i think you can leave if everyone else does so you even need to give space travel to everyone or you're stuck here you need to fix it right actually but i do think nasa and stuff do good like good space exploration nasa are definitely better than um all of these private

businesses they're better than spacex they're better than these sort of um what's the virgin one virgin galactic is it or yeah i've got some sort of wacky name for it where they do these like tours yeah you fly over the planet um that's all bullshit well that's sightseeing that's that's tourism you should just go to one of those rooms with the big fans on the floor yeah well that'd be that's what you want i i think what you touched on a point there um in terms of we should go first they should go last almost no but i think an alternative is i think every time we send a ship into space we need at least one rich person on there yes a lottery for people with a net worth over a certain amount yes they have to go up and then that way they're going to make sure it's safe

which is fine because remember rich people are rich because they're smarter than us and they work harder than this and there's no other like environmental reasons yes so they're the perfect people to send into space yeah they can only they can fix the issues yes so they go up there they're clearly engineers or bright in some other way i mean they hire engineers which means they are technically they have to be if you're rich and you run a company that's primarily engineering you're clearly a very solid engineer yeah especially if you tell everyone you are it would seem that the subtext is quickly becoming text no the fun thing is it applies to all but that does mean that we were thinking of one

yeah but no i think we need to make sure that everybody's in on this if we're all doing space stuff it's all of us doing space i think they can't go first or last because they'll either send everyone off or they'll stay or they'll stay i agree they go in the middle yes it can't be a trick yeah and they can't have an escape pod either no no no that right okay that's it yeah we don't this might be controversial no escape pods on the on the space stuff because they'll use it yeah i've i know about the titanic i know what happened there in fact let's take all that money use it to build a space program and then give them plastic surgery and send them up so no

one knows they're rich oh and then we make a game show out of it yes it's like survivor but the loser gets thrown out a lot because people think they're a billionaire it's it's a bit of an undercover boss thing yeah but it's also the game werewolf yes i like it or secret hitler which is topical for the game yeah i think yeah we need to we need to really put some safeguards in place all right fine i'm fine with space stuff continuing if it's under the provision that all of these billionaires all of these uh executives that also want to go to space or dabble in space faring they need to be thrown in some sort of lottery as you've pointed out is a good idea i think we need to make sure that there's collateral yes and also that i get no credit for it no you can't get

credit no no it's meant to be a collective thing for the human race it's only credit when it's worked when we've got a material positive that we can measure and go look this has actually paid off and then we can give a kudos to whoever actually pulled it off that's fair but no more of this let's build rockets for the sake of it because if you do that i think you're just trying to leave i think you're either trying to leave or you're just scamming the government out of money i think it's both man i think it's also in column b you cannot be involved in space and own your own bunker no you can't have like a post-apocalyptic survival bunker and be worried about the future either make things better for humanity or go full hermit mode yeah don't pretend to do one

yeah none of this sitting on the fence you need to be in a bunker or you need to be in space no I agree you can't have both you can't have a company that does all this digging and also does space stuff can you

yeah we got some common ground there which seems to be fuck millionaires but also stay out of space it's not it's billionaires the millionaires aren't even that bad anymore oh no i don't care about millionaires they're a fucking drop in the ocean they are they are pissing into an ocean of piss at this point it doesn't really matter well i i think we've covered that off we've we've managed to put the the wrongs right we've talked about the game and we've addressed pretty much everything

we need to address andrew what do you think i think people should stay subtle humble and brave I think they should tune in next week I think they should and if you need to drop us some communication you know how to we're not in space we're not in a bunga we're committed to this we're at the other end of info wolvermate.co.uk that's an email address at

wolvermate on instagram that's an instagram address or wolvermate.co.uk fill out a web form that's a web address get in touch get in touch or don't we know you're listening we love you and stay humble and brave deserts of your minds

I was going to say stay in the deserts of your mind it's safe there stay subtle, humble and brave in the deserts of your mind that works, that works that should be the slogan that should be how it ends

that should be how we wrap this up, every time we just keep this going it just continues, it's just it's comfortable it's nice, it's a good vibe just so we can done yeah well i'm gonna be playing the outro over this bit oh okay yeah this this is oh thank god yeah something fell apart somewhere along the lines here we can we can list whatever okay

so we do it now yeah yeah let's do it