War With A Mate - Episode 40: Ragebait

Episode Date: September 5, 2025

Look to the skies! And then to a calm, quiet space. James has released unbridled rage upon Andy following unexpected strategic shifts at the end of a particularly ambitious air mission segment. Important questions are asked, such as the future of global sporting, the marketing behind CfNA and the state of the guys’ hair.

hello it's us it's the people i'm andy yeah i'm james it's a ball with me it is it is let's just cut through the noise yeah hello australia greetings hello because we've just had a little look and turns out most of the people listening to this are in australia that's not what we thought was the case just trying to gauge you know where in the world people are trying to tap into our voices figure out what's going on and a lot of it seems to be from down under that's that's interesting what you guys doing why are you listening to us we're all the way across the world does that not that must strain the internet hard that makes us exotic oh that's a good point yeah that's what it is we're we're from a strange distant land yeah so let's do a bunch of australian

podcasts yeah that's a good point i like uh i like some things from australia myself so maybe it's that draw we're two ends of the earth yeah we're we're just beaming information straight through the core of the earth which makes it our ancestors were prisoners and we've imprisoned ourselves yeah that's a good point yeah so it has a bit of a circular narrative to it we're we're writing the wrongs of history and we're making our own history indeed we are one play session at a time and what a play session this one was oh some high octane action a lot of fun with this one some real some real bloodshed last one a little slow doing all the supplies and stuff but uh yeah back to the old drudging spreadsheets but today that's long gone that's

distant history we were doing uh we did the air stage we did upstage one for turn two we did we did turn two as well underway air missions have just been complete we not only map them out but we carry them out they're complete the emissions have been satisfied my eight air missions and your three emissions yeah um before we get into them i do just the way the room's set up we do the air stuff sitting on the floor so it's a nice throwback yeah it's back back to the the days of yesteryear when we would sit down on the floor breaking our backs i mean i think on multiple occasions we both got up and we're like oh god my legs are falling asleep i was walking along like a cowboy bull-legged because i couldn't bend my legs properly because i've been in a squatting

position which i mean hey it's going to be great for my my calves and my thighs i would imagine but uh it's not a comfortable long-term position it's not and i also don't think it's that great exercise because i was hunched over as well i think you need to do more than one squat where you go down pause for like 20 minutes and then stand up it does wonders for my thighs and my my calves but my spine is going to be deformed so i'll be yeah i won't be very aerodynamic when i run because i'll be hunched over forward that's i've done that with just sitting over a desk so that's a good point what can you get carpal tunnel for your spine i think it's not carpal tunnel it's just some kind of scoliosis i would imagine yeah well that's what i'm gonna get

and another thing i got was some victories up in the air you did it was an interesting one because you went wide this time eight missions i got real wide i i went for quite a few i've actually got the air missions here so with air missions um you you may already remember we declare them at the same time then we play them out bit by bit so i opened up with a few air missions i decided to strafe your trucks uh yes one of your truck convoy truck convoy two coast yeah yeah up along the north they are the ones who are sat with the fourth indian division correct so strafe them i also strafed your seventh armored division which you've recently bolstered with a lot more infantry yeah which i'm not a fan of that's why i went for them because i've not really utilized

strafing much in the past yeah it was your first strafing yeah i thought i'd give it a go and turns out it's good yeah what i didn't check beforehand is whether or not my planes could strafe that was bad however by chance the ones i assigned can strafe it did work out as long as it's during the day yes what is that's something a bit of a segue what is the benefit of night missions because we've not done any night missions i think from reading it i guess we'll when we go into them i think it's the fact that unopposed primarily right because less planes less planes can do um night stuff at all uh and i think only one or two of mine can scramble at night right so if you're doing defensive air stuff it's a good way to try and restrict the amount

of opposition yeah cool cool um so i strafed the seventh armor division i then did some bombing i blew my bombing load today i used pretty much all of my ammunition in my airfields committing to these bombing runs i'm dry all of my bombers that were all uh ammoed up i've sent off today you love to hear it i don't well to be fair i've got some that need to be refitted um they have bombs in them but i think it's like a quarter of what i used today yeah so i decided to also bomb truck convoy 2 the one i strafed just to get it on both ends i bombed one of your supply dumps a fairly central supply dump uh yes it's the one nearest to the most useful one i also then decided to bomb truck convoy three which is another of yours along the north

yes but it's a bit further um it's on the way that one i think i'll need to double check when we get to the truck convoy i think that one's on its way back yes it might be i think that one is a lot of empty trucks, but I still lost five. Was it not seven overall? Was that not two? Possibly. I think I lost seven trucks.

Yeah, because you strafed two and bombed five, and then the other one you did seven, I think. So, took out some more trucks over at truck three, and that's your, another northern convoy along the road on map D. So, the map between conflict zone of C

and your safe zone of E. and then i also on that same map try to bomb three uh three sections of road yeah i didn't appreciate that yeah thankfully i only got one one of the three i do appreciate that and and that comes from me misreading one of the charts yes you were going off the torpedo chart which is more generous yes turns out you need to commit fewer torpedoes to get the the best results than bombs so i was going off um 341 torpedo points is the the end of the thresholds whereas for bombs it's 471 so i was committing just enough to hit the 341 i think i had like 344 for most of my bombing runs which of course just meant that i was two columns to the left which is a pretty

big difference it means that for the road stuff later on it was a lot harder i needed i think 52 or higher yeah out of 66 so that ended up being a bit of a faux pas on my part or fox's paw i was that one okay saw a little thing uh earlier this week where people were talking about ways to rage bait um people into correcting you on pronunciation of stuff okay yeah it came from a post where somebody had said they should open up a restaurant in i think they said new york or something they said all sushi restaurants should be called squid pro quo and then somebody corrected them saying it's actually quid pro quo it's latin and it's like right you've missed this one then buddy and there was this whole like stream of conversation that came on afterwards where people

were talking about waste of rage bit people into correcting you so one of them is saying fox's paws instead of faux pas i'm gonna start doing this because the thing is i like to correct people on language i want to be on the receiving end i want to see how that goes it's annoying oh is it now right okay um that feels like i should take that under advice so that was my bombing missions my strafing missions yes and i had three missions of my own you did i sent two lots of fighters on uh combat air patrol yes i sent them to seven and the fourth indian because i thought you might bomb them again because we were playing around with that last turn yeah last turn i really went heavy on bombing you guys so i was thinking they would be a good screen for that they ended up

being a good screen for your bombing on the trucks and the strafing runs yes so the fight over the seventh i think did you down i think i don't three or four and you don't two maybe so the fight over the the seventh yeah so i lost um i lost two guys you lost two guys fight over the seventh so i got off my my strafing everyone who survives gets to strafe and then when it came to the fight over the fourth when I was trying to bomb your trucks you got quite a few kills

you got four kills I only got a lowly two yeah and the way the air combat works is I think we might have explained this but basically if there's a screen of fighters the fighters you resolve that first and then whatever the difference is if the attacker has more planes

that many planes get through so I've sent 21 and lost two. You sent 16, was it? 15 for one, 16 for the other. Yeah, but then lost four. So, yeah, I got eight through. Yes, you got eight through, and you took out two bombers.

Two bombs and lost one. Yeah, one of my bombers actually shot you down with a snake eyes roll. That flying and formation TAC air boost is actually pretty big, because you ended up with... Your bombers had more TAC air than my fighters. it's just the maneuverability is the big thing yeah if you have a formation of 8 to 17 fighters sorry bombers you get an additional one point to your attack air if you have 18 or more which i did

i had 31 you got two added to your attacker which is the thing that that's the sort of core value that determines the differential and then maneuverability also affects it after the fact and it's pretty significant because tacker seems to i think they top out at six or so i think there might be some planes that are like eight maybe like the spitfires or messerschmitts we get later but for now it's a it's a pretty small range so that plus two is pretty massive yeah i ended up coming out with six for my attack air and then i had a couple pilots on there which bumped up to seven yeah so it's some crazy values in the end um and and it worked out well for me i ended up having a bit of a defensive line because of that even though you got eight through took down two

bombers which if i had got the thresholds right looking at the table correctly that would have pushed me down one yes however since i got that wrong it meant that i was still comfortably within the same bracket yeah so nothing got affected really but you did take out two bombers which is a material change to my air force yeah i'll take it we got air reinforcements today as well yes uh i got um a hurricane which is one of my better planes at the minute and uh it's a type of plane i've not had before oh yes you got a new one um need to have a proper look at that and see it's a i think it's a fighter uh but i need to see how good it is well i got uh i got 12 bombers yeah and then i get some more between turns three and six but not a huge amount

i think i get another 12 again then yeah i do get 30 bombers next turn oh shit that's bad i need to get because bellenheim's there's bellenheim's mark one through like four oh and then there's bellenheim with the number and then f they are fighters right so um i think they're bellenheim mark ones but yeah it seems bellenheim equipped a lot of the planes for the commonwealth to start with well it's it's as always fun the air combat has never let us down it's always been a big part of the enjoyment from the game and coming up next we've got some some movement stuff big movement stuff um yeah because you gave me a little sneak preview of what you're gonna do you son of a bitch yes you really have taken it too far this time andy

and the thing is you had this smug look on your face we were taking a little break from the air combat and you were just sat there with this big shit-eating grin talking about how i'm gonna hate what you do next and i was like is he gonna box in the fourth black shirts is he gonna try and sweep down south and undercut me and it's it's a little bit of the second one because what you're actually trying to do is steal all my fucking trucks yeah i've motorized the northumberland fusiliers and the scott's guard i think it is and they're just my they're suiciding behind your enemy lines to disrupt my plan is they're going to try and steal a bunch of your trucks and then basically use the stolen supplies to drive into the desert and get away which is hurtful because

my whole air mission revolved around disrupting your supply line by taking out your trucks taking out your supply dump and breaking up the road so it's going to be harder to supply your men around this frontier so the last thing i needed to hear is that you're about to steal all my supplies yeah well it's been the it's line one of my doctrine at the minute which is fuck the trucks yes yes of course you've always said that yeah what gives you the right i mean you it's a war so what gives me the right is you not being able to stop me well i can and the thing that you pointed out you you little tease is that when you steal these trucks and when you start to drive south there is a chance for me to chase you yes but if i chase you i'm following you into the

middle of the desert as well with likely a full division because that's all i've really got to hand i've got like seven divisions and i don't really want to kill a division by chasing you into the desert to try and get my trucks which will almost definitely break down en route yes so you're just going to be sat there with my broken down trucks trying to eat my food which i need to remind you i don't have there's nothing in there of use so you're just stealing trucks with like a few breadcrumbs and empty shells why why would you do that to a man i'm making a new version of the long range desert group no you're not you're making trouble for the sake of it yeah you're stoking the flames of conflict you're trying to rub me up the wrong way god it's working

i mean that's good an angry enemy makes mistakes no you're making mistakes now that doesn't i'm gonna show up with a can of deodorant a lighter and i'm gonna set you on fire that's the only way for this to work really that is i mean within the matter of this game rejecting the game and assaulting me i mean it'll end the game i reject the game okay i accept instead a form of anarchy which is arson it's not arson with a mate it's not it's war with a mate but you know you're dropping the mate bit by doing this

it's just going to be war with a friend that's what common ground was for it's gonna it's not good enough what I feel well it's your common ground today so you better have really fucking pulled something out of the bag it's something otherwise it's just war with the guy I know

I guess the other thing we didn't mention my other bombing was I bombed your supply dump you did which is feeding the southern army it is it's been sat there for a while the only people that tapped into it so far were the um someone's tapped in no so no one has tapped into it sorry it was the reason that there's something missing is because fuel evaporated i was wondering why there's so little of it used yeah no one's actually tapped into it yet but it is a nice little stop gap a bit of a way station between where the saharan division is in the siwa oasis and everything else going on so what it does is it if anything it's kind of reminded me that it's

there because it's just sat there for the the whole turn so far turn one i was kind of hoping it would be just full of fuel and ammo because it's within travel like a upstage travel of the oasis which has unlimited stores and water yes so i was hoping because ammo is a pretty big one yeah to lose it seems to be the stores or ammo i don't know which one yeah it's a tightener at the minute but water and fuel seem to be fairly abundant well on that note actually stores has become a bit of an issue for me because i've realized some of my garrisons are now losing um people because of the the lack of stores so we had a look at the rules today we had to try and figure this one out because it says for every two consecutive turns that a unit does

not have stores in that hex that they lose two percent of their toe strength point and it's cumulative and also increases by another two percent every single two consecutive op stages so we had to we had to determine how that looks because it says rounded to the nearest whole number and we are going off the assumption that it includes zero as a whole number yeah because otherwise it means if i have a a unit that has a two strength of say one it's just dead then as soon as it reaches that second turn without stores they're they're dead entirely and there's not many units where you can realistically have two percent that comes to a full toe point no in a hex like that's a huge amount of men to be in that space 200 toe point of infantry yes which is 20 000 men

in one block yeah which i i don't believe that happened it just feels like a very skewed figure so it seems to be the case we've determined it to mean that it takes a while for it to build up to once it's at 0.5 then you round up the losses yeah is the way that the game seems to dictate this kind of thing and then because it's rounding up and it's cumulative next turn you'll also lose one yes so it's a slow ramp up and then once it flips you're losing at least one to a point yes yep so it will eventually hit hard but at the moment it means that i'm safe for a while these smaller units the garrisons where they have so they're sort of one to five tour points for the most part these garrisons yeah and i think i've got seven garrisons that are starving

that's pretty bad yeah it really speaks to my um bad supply line that you're trying to steal as if it's some sort of fort knox full of gold bullions of food no it's far more useful it's life-sustaining goods there's no life-sustaining goods in the trucks there's something of value in them there's No, right, you've got to get this out of your head. There's nothing in the trucks, Andy. They're completely empty. They're not completely empty, but they're functionally empty. Well, they're functionally mine.

I guess now they are. The only hope I have is that when you get there, your trucks break down so your units can't move. But then I'll mechanise with your trucks. Well, you're going to have to then use a lot of CPA to then start reorganising shit, so... No, not air. You're going to have to do that. You're going to have to put your men into the trucks.

You're going to have to load them up. Then they'll be full of your men, and then I'm going to bomb them. how about that that's fine is it yes you shouldn't be accepting that you said you have very few bonds if you waste them on 300 guys running around with trust stop listening to what i'm saying i'm sorry is that unfair stop using the information i'm giving you at all that's it i'm using yeah stop it when i talk just sort of like bounce back with light remarks and and don't take anything to heart and then forget yeah just forget about it okay forget about it that's not happening right another exciting element in this uh play session yeah

the fleet's in play oh cool right go on then talk about your fleet uh i've sent them pretty much as far as they can go to menace some airfields. Yeah, you have, haven't you? Yeah. So they'll be dying. But my airfields? Yes, I know. Why? So you don't have them?

Yeah, thought so. Because they're not airfields, they're airstrips. Yeah, so they only house one squadron. Yeah, and if I do one, if I manage to knock a level off, they're gone. You remove it. Yes, it's over. Yeah. So I need to double check

which units are there which squads yeah i guarantee it's going to be one of the bombs one of the bombing uh groups that i still have armed and ready to go you're going to be taking them out yeah i know how my luck works with this game because my second doctrine has been get rid of your ass in byriari via fighting on the land yeah you've done that a lot you killed my sgsus yeah which i actually need to check uh when they come back it's a it's upstage two that they come back this turn yeah it is it's not like four turns or something four turns one turn it's one thing to use the actual game rules to fuck me it's another to make up rules to fuck me while cheating why would you don't attack me on both fronts the logical real world and the fictional hyper

Fantasia Andy World. Okay. Fine. You alright there? This common ground's got to be fucking golden. No. But really fun session.

The game is actually still enjoyable. Yeah, we're still in the honeymoon phase. Everything's still quite new and exciting. through that classic phase where you despise the person and don't want to spend any time with them and want them to leave your life and now we have stockton syndrome yeah well yeah we started at the i think the first 15 was like a bitter divorce yeah the first 15 it was it was me being so angry

at the game that i was really contemplating whether or not i wanted to play it and then when we started to play it i actually started to enjoy aspects of it again you know last session the admin stuff don't love it managed to get a bit of a ticked off at home so in between it doesn't feel too bad but then when we're sat here playing and we get to the good parts it really does make the admin team not all that bad i don't think this game's really that bad which sort of takes the sting out of what we're doing yeah we're gonna have to keep we can start playing up how much we that's it you know i feel like when we started this off we had 15 sessions of us reading the rules and get all all riled up and now we're like we're just playing a game we quite enjoy

yeah thing is that will change i think when it comes to the main playthrough because when i start to lose stuff in that i'm going to become very resentful yeah also there's been several times i've not been that psyched to play but the whole thing is still new and exciting enough to overcome the like i'm tired i don't want to do this yeah the project itself but when we're seven years in i don't think that freshness is gonna be there well what's crazy is we're coming up to a year of this idea because it was october when we put this thing together yes so we're like a month off of being a year of this whole thing starting yeah we'll have to figure out a an annual special an annual special god what would that look like horrible i would imagine i don't know what we

do we played like two games at once don't worry i'll take care of it no no you're not taking care of anything i'll be responsible for planning that why would you do that i know it's gonna be bad for me we're gonna we're gonna destroy the game for the anniversary we can't buy a new one we can't they've spiked in price yeah god they have yeah we've driven up the market yeah we got in at the bottom i don't think we were at the bottom i think the bottom was when it cost $40 in the 70s so how much oh yeah i think it was like $38 $39.99 or something in 1979 which is expensive back then it's expensive but it's really in the pocket of like oh little timmy likes board games i'll get him this for christmas it's not like an

unappealing price can you imagine you imagine christmas day on christmas day i mean what the hell like i've had experiences where all of my sort of fond memories of christmas when i've got like a new thing to enjoy it's like a new games console yeah i've got my first 360 i load up crackdown start playing that or i got my my xbox one and i had the agility orbs on crackdown fuck me hated collecting them so good and then um xbox one i downloaded it was uh it's this like barbarian game it's just it's like a fairly simple game it was not at all the appropriate use of the x pokemon and its horsepower but i i downloaded that played it so much fun christmas day 1980 you open up this board game oh yeah my kids into into war games he likes history he goes to the

games workshop with his little buddies this is probably the same thing yeah oh they've started playing this this new game dungeons and dragons but he likes something a bit more tactical he's He's into war history. Let's open this up. Oh, no. What the fuck is this? 192 pages of rules. What is it about pasta?

I'd love to hear from anyone. I don't know how many boxes they printed and sold, so it's a very small sample size probably. I'd love to hear from someone who got this as, like, a gift. Or, like, anyone who didn't buy it at the time as a collector's item. yeah someone who bought it as like the the sort of up-and-coming board game like i'm gonna play this because it's the most simulatey game ever or even funnier someone got it as a gift i'd love to know how marketed it was when it first came out like was it the case you'd go into these like board

game shops or wherever they were sold is it like they've got a big stand where there's like 10 of these things stacked up on top of each other in like a little pyramid you know when you go to like waterstones yeah and they've got like a new book see this game doesn't fit into that i feel like this is like wargamer quarterly magazine there's like an ad in the back that you can like post away yeah because like i don't see a shop like oh yeah we're gonna get that in yeah because they also didn't design this richard berg didn't put this together and go this is going to be the the hit selling product of the summer no he thought it was a joke yeah he made it to torture us in the future yes so there's no way that he designed it being like this is going to be the

next big hit for spi i guess you probably did but because of spi's catalog but i don't know i don't know how this thing was sold it was it a writing order was it in shops that much it must have been niche shops that it was sold in yeah but yeah i guess those shops did exist but like i feel like that like the big swing of nerdy stuff like at least where we live a lot of those shops opened they feel fairly contemporary yeah but it's almost like a surge of nostalgia a lot of the stuff that they sell is like comics and then you get like a lot of there's one in town that's like very big on board games and they've got like a ton of board games and thing is all of them are like contemporary board games they're like the new stuff that's out there's not many

places i can think of that sell like old board games like like this no obviously not this is like an extreme one but a lot of the other games that we've come across in the same space like uh like code blue all these are the ones that are these are the obscure very long difficult hex and counter games basically yeah i don't feel like i see them like i see cludo in brazil or like five versions of monopoly but not yeah there's all sorts of different questions i have about how this game came to be yeah i'm gonna put another request out this one's even less likely than somebody got it at the time anyone who was in the building at the time like if you were an intern if you worked in like sales not making the games where i want to know what was going on

because i also i have this theory that this game could have been worked on forever and two years in someone went pack it in we're releasing this and there was a scramble yeah i'd love to know i don't think it was like hey guys this is done it was like you guys have wasted too much time yeah we want to hear from anybody who has any involvement with anything to do with this game ideally as far back as possible if you remember seeing this in the shops if you have a parent or a family member who was maybe into this kind of thing when they were younger or if they can remember anything about this did an ambitious friend try to rope you went to play it over a summer holiday like yeah have you joked about this before i guess how many

people have heard about this game in detail before this i imagine a lot of you probably heard about the game that's probably why you're interested because it's become a thing but not it wasn't always no i'd because i've i don't think i'd heard about it until our friend mentioned it no and then we set up on this course and then you have the thing it's like oh wow i feel like it's going up in popularity it was like well no i'm now looking for it yeah i'd love to know what happens to the other copies that are bought it's got to be a collector's item it must be i i think there's i'd be shocked if there's many people buying it to play it like we've seen a few like the the board game in place in seattle and a few other people who are playing it but yeah it's uh

we like to keep tabs on everyone who's playing yeah we like we like to know what's going on we keep an eye on you if you're playing the game we know about it we are aware yeah we have a little a little red telephone

on the wall that rings we pick it up yep Andy we've got another one yeah it's Chicago this time we've sensed a spike

of annoyance in Chicago there's been a great disturbance in the force as if a thousand little pieces of game were pushed out and then

Blu-Tack stuck to them but all of you people out there regardless of if you're playing the game or not we know what you're saying mostly because you email us and you tell us no um and and speaking of that we actually have an email to read out now this one is a this is a long one this is a long bit of correspondence so this will probably be the only one we can get through this week

um but it's a good one it comes from arrow oh we've got a we've got a pseudonym i like it it's probably because we've accidentally read people's names out and then had to constantly doxed people my mistake yeah we always bleep it out we always bleep it out but you know i get why you've got the fear of god in you that we're just going to read out your full name and social security number or national insurance number you don't send those in but we do have them it's best not to give us the option don't allow us that put whatever funny names in you like it's the content that matters the the content of the message it's the the idea not the man or woman behind it it's just what you're right anyway just waiting for my phone to load up there i was stalling a little bit

i couldn't tell good it's just yeah you don't want dead air so especially not when i had to say so arrow says hello james and andy i finally caught up i'd give you my first real name but it's the same as someone who's already emailed in a few times so instead you can use my screen name arrow i like it anyway i'm yet another fan by way of cam yes cam sandwich good guy and started your podcast this august i was originally listening through youtube before moving over to the apple podcast app iphone users without youtube premium will know why you can't close your phone with the podcast still going otherwise i had youtube premium briefly um got a trial for it i'd recommend it um if you have money to dispose of because it's costly i posted some of the scan few comments

you all gotten on youtube i'll have to double check those because i don't know that i've read the youtube comments so i will have to go back through that arrow um in which i promised to send an email when i caught up and with episode 38 on 28th of august i have done that i have mostly been listening while traversing deserts of kenshi the product of some other british minds great game with a good steam modding community and a prequel in development i'm happy to have picked the game back up after not playing for a couple years don't know that game not heard of it i've heard of it I've not seen it. It seems like a very open-world sandbox

where you run around some medieval thing. It looks all right. Some YouTubers are likely to play it, but I'm not giving it a go. I'll have a little delve into that, see what's going on. You go on to say, and now I have a few questions.

Number one, is James still bald? Number two, what happened to the rainstorm? Number three, have you come up with a better name for your fans than perverts yet? Wankers, perhaps. Brackets, joke. You've talked a lot about James getting the Germans later on in the game, but will Andy get the Americans? They did participate in North Africa after they joined the war. And lastly, do the German tanks break down more often? They had a terrible habit of making them too heavy for their engines and had problems sourcing petroleum lubricants and rubber for seals and gaskets, leading many of their models to break down more easily than Allied designs, even under ideal conditions.

However, for many years until recently, German tanks have been glorified by military enthusiasts because victors do not actually write their history all the time, and surviving Nazi military leaders made memoirs which shaped people's view of the German side of things long after the war. Considering the age of the game, I'm curious to see if Richard Berg was aware of their true failings or not. I can recommend Laser Pig for some very entertaining

presented history of tanks from this period and their glorification in the years since the war. Shall we hit those questions? yeah some good questions in there so are you still bald am i still bald i'm not i'm not i did reference that a little while ago that i'd shaved my head like back end of last year um and i'm not no i've let it grow back out it was it was on a whim i've done it a few times don't think i'll be doing it again anytime soon i did get told i look like a bad boy when i have my hair shaved however it's just not worth it um i'm a bad boy at heart anyway so that'll do me

i do have my biannual haircut coming up you do you do it's getting to the point i can't put headphones in so time to shave it down to a four all over yeah yeah that's that's what you usually do what are you doing about your beard because you've you've waxed about getting rid of your beard every now and then i'm on the fence i think i'm getting rid of it but also it's like if i don't like it afterwards it's a long time to get it back also since the beard i've gained quite a bit of weight i think it's been a chin hider to a certain extent i want to see what the chin looks like so i may have to cut it and then abruptly start looking after my health i don't i don't think i've seen your chin since we first moved in together because you've had a beard

pretty much since oh it's covid yeah oh it's a covid yeah i'm gonna have to go back through some old pictures see if i can figure out when the beard i used to be a cleanly shaved fresh looking guy you were i remember when you were clean shaved and you've got you've got and you've got quite curly hair as well trying to paint a picture for the people got a bit of a fro yeah you got a bit of a fro going on and i would probably what if i what would i describe mine as something of a messy quiff maybe yeah yeah maybe that um and definitely not a beard as impressive as yours andy so that's my hair situation what happened to the rainstorm was question two uh The race storm ended.

It lasts for an upstage, and then it goes away. Every upstage, you re-roll the weather. We had a few runs of normal weather. We're currently in hot weather, which I forgot about until today, actually. Hasn't affected... Doesn't affect aircraft. No. But it will affect water consumption.

Have you done it for your water distribution? Double. I have been doing it, yes. Which is brutal. It's not fun. Some of my units are actually quite bad for water now. Have you come up with a better name for your fans than Perverts yet? Wangers, perhaps.

um we haven't we haven't we we actually didn't want perverts to be something catches on at all um so i don't know um maiters that sounds fine yeah there we go you know what off the there it is maiters that's it here it is there it is it does happen it does ring it's in the same school as one yeah there you go maiters uh there you go done tick that one off oh business This is booming. Talk a lot about James getting the Germans later on. Will Andy get the Americans? Yes.

Yes, yes, he does. Tanks, I believe, are a big thing. I get American tanks. I think I get a few aircraft. I don't actually know if I get any units. I don't know that you get any... Because I think they got stuff from land lease, but I think when the Americans arrived in Africa,

they came across from Morocco. Yes. So they pincered them for the most part. so I don't know if I actually get any American units. It does mention specifically the land lease agreement in the rules and that you get a lot more trucks because of that. Yes. You get a surge of trucks late game and you also get

pardon me, I've got the hiccups there you also get yeah, Sherman tanks Yes. And a few other types of tanks So yeah, there is an American influence and you also go on to ask do the German tanks break down more often?

There is an adjustment table for tanks in general for breakdown. So far with the italian tanks it's i believe a shift two columns to the left which is quite bad right to the right sorry it's bad um there is definitely going to be some sort of shift for america not american tanks german tanks i've not checked the table though i'm trying to keep a little bit of mystique as to what i'm going to get when it comes to the german forces so i've not looked at it in detail but that was something i will be interested to see i might have a little sneak peek out of curiosity uh i think as to his point about them being glorified i i i mean we'd have to look i

think uh if it's a modern thing that that's being re-examined richard baird was probably going off the the old way of looking at that most likely because there is a lot of bigging up of like the panzers and stuff like that um yeah the panzers are definitely scary i'll need to check that breakdown value yeah because i guess that that's the thing reliability versus efficiency if they're if they're you know really reliable in combat in terms of the the kind of damage they're dealing and how durable they are that might be a very different thing to break down and thankfully the game has the means to have them be very scary in combat but also very susceptible to breakdown yeah so that'll be interesting to see if that's actually translated so good question arrow and i

will definitely have a look at that because i'm interested as to whether or not that has carried through the verisimilitude i haven't heard that one in a while have we you're bringing it back um so you you go on with uh some more i also wanted to suggest that you call any future store pages the fake supply dump it's something that has come up several times in episodes and i think it's funny i like that i like that um yeah because the fake supply dump and also the dummy tank formations are both quite fun yeah well today when you said you're going to bomb a supply dump i had to check to see if it was a real supply dump or not because i've not used it i did have that in my head i was like i'm not seeing a lot of things going in and out of that

but i'm going to take the risk that it's strategically enough police that is real well as we now know it is indeed genuine because it didn't just burst into flames as soon as you hit it on the topics of ponchos capes and cloaks cloaks should definitely make a return for their functionality in certain seasons and with the dramatic rise in popularity of fantasy i think it's possible as for ponchos i took to using one over an umbrella several years ago for the better coverage and because i use a bicycle as my main mode of transportation also i recently got something called a ruana wrap that i've just been wanting which is pretty much just a square piece of cloth with a section cut down the middle to the edge of one size so you can put it over yourself and

still have two halves hanging in front of you which you can toss over your shoulder or various other things very versatile very fun very much in the cape cloak poncho family that's interesting that's a new one to add to the roster yeah i didn't know about that but uh i have not heard of that before gonna have a little look should we have a look at the rhino wrap and see what it looks like so quickly because i'm trying to visualize what that actually looks like because i imagine it's it's versatile definitely these so okay okay i like it i like it you know what it's giving um it's giving jedi vibes yes that's that's what i'm getting from that i like it though that does look cozy yeah oh we should get one of those looks like obi-wan would wear that when he's

hanging out in the desert or i was just thinking that incognito moaning yes that's that's incognito kenobi vibes i like that a lot well thank you for that arrow that's another piece of clothing we're gonna have to look at some of the things i wanted to say this year i graduated with my bachelors in history congratulations well done i specialize in the first world war and the cold war so you nicely sandwiched what we're doing yeah well this is world war ii buddy so get your facts straight you're talking about the wrong war god oh now i'm starting to doubt all of that tank stuff you're probably talking about a different war i largely got over learning about world war ii in high school that doesn't mean i have no interest though and i still know a lot about it and i've

greatly enjoyed your history segments hey big ups andy and fully intend to pick up a copy of libyan sands highly recommended uh just a good read um i also get that world war ii from high school thing yeah because it it's the big focus it was a thing i wasn't interested in until we started this again because again i was like that's the only bit of history we got taught in school and it turns out quite an unhelpful version of it all yeah this has been way more interesting than anything in school also if you have any gherkas in the british forces they should be considered for your next unit spotlight if not you have 10 to 20 years it'll probably come up eventually haha if you ever need any help researching anything feel free to reach out

and i'll do my best that's very generous arrow thank you um but don't give any too much of an out we need to keep them busy during the week if you just want to ask for some world war first world war contacts for anything going on do reach out it did come up when discussing the italian leaders after all for example you mentioned that italy and austria-hungary technically had an alliance but when to war anyway i'd gladly tell you about that well there you go and you got a little tap of info when it comes to i'm just probably won't make on the episode but i might fire a thing because it's interesting another thing i've not read house of leaves but i've been aware of it since watching agotic literature the weirdest book genre by cloud cuckoo country

which discusses the book and others like it such as this is how you lose the time war fantastic book my cousin recommended me to that when we were on holiday and I ended up reading it in like a day and a half when we were meant to be doing other stuff oh you did it on the holiday? yes

that's so you I was reading it in the kitchen while people were talking shut up I can picture you in that situation but that is a great book it's a quick, pretty short as well but yeah, recommended also please post more of your images to the website as i do not have an instagram nor do i

wish to make one and thus cannot see many of your posts there very very good point arrow we do need to update the website because it's been left to gather dust it's not in a great state uh we had such big plans we've got a lot of really big plans and that's why it you have we we've spread ourselves too thin a little bit maybe we might have 10 people playing this goddamn game so we We do need to do that, Arrow, and thank you for keeping on top of us with that, because we do need to update that. So that's something for maybe this week, I think. That's probably

plenty for one email. I'll write again later, though. God, we've got more, Arrow. That's genuinely impressive. Especially with it all being relevant to the game and interesting. Yeah. Keep having fun and keep going, guys. Subtle, humble, and brave, Arrow. Thank you very much. Thank you a lot for that. That's a very good email.

Very thorough. Some good questions in there. Thought-provoking. And also asking whether or not we need some help with previous aspects of history, I'm sure Andy will take you up on that to some degree. And we appreciate any mail, especially mail

as diverse and interesting as that one. Yeah, love hearing from you guys. You can get us via that email address of info at warwithamate.co.uk. The Instagram, do you have one or wish to make one? Our Instagram is just warwithamate and we also have the website

which, yes, it's been left to its own devices. Defend for Itself in the Desert. It's warweathermade.co.uk There's a web form on there that you can send over if you wish, but it's quite basic. I don't think we've really updated it in the last five months. No.

We'll put a gallery up, I guess. There's some pictures on there of the game at the moment, but there's no recent pictures of the game. Yes. I think it's still pictures when we had it on the floor before the picture frames, you know. Yeah, I think you're right. Yeah, we should have a... Let's have an update session.

yes we should i think that's all the pictures i think pre-actual gameplay i think it's all during setup yes which is wild that's so long ago yeah we do we keep wanting to get a camera though yeah we could so we have actually good quality pictures you're talking about getting a camera as if we have any sort of budget with this thing or know anything about cameras we have no this thing does not have a budget this has all been we blew the budget by buying the fucking game And then the magnets to stick to it We live in the hole It's okay, we're making it back with the fun times we have

It's worth it, maybe If you spread the game out over like 12 years it's pretty good value for money I don't know man Well all of that's in the history the past, the history

It's all in the history Andy, do the history section Oh, that's I think my favourite transition we've done it's so slick so yes we're continuing Italo Balbo's life I guess yeah life and misadventures

yeah so last time he'd done some stunt flying he became the most famous man in the world yeah that's wild and because he became the most famous man in the world or not

in the world but became incredibly famous and loved Mussolini didn't like that so his plan is to send Balbo well he's not sending him to Libya because Libya doesn't exist at this point he's sending him to be governor general

of Italian Tripolitania Jesus Christ Sirenica and Fasan he gets this job I forgot the quote hit you with it it's just him accepting the job from today in the name of his majesty i assume

the government my three predecessors volpe de bono and bagnoleo have accomplished great works i intend to follow in their footsteps slight dig there because in the name of his majesty he's ignoring mussolini i was thinking that yeah that's not who mussolini is because uh tensions between them are starting to rise further i was half expecting the court when he's accepting the job was just i accept the job there's another one there is basically that that's like a public speech when he gets the job he's just like sure um but yeah on the 7th of november 1933 he's appointed governor general of those three states uh his task is to assert italy's rights to lands in north africa um at this point graziani that fuck has been carrying out the libyan genocide

since 1929 what a dick yep so as of the 1st of january 1934 triple glania serenica and frazan are merged to form the common colony of libya okay so libya's yeah formed then so just to give you a sense of what all this is for from the italian perspective i guess mussolini he wants essentially i guess yeah uh there's a problem many european powers have at this time examples are like germany russia italy uh they don't have access to the global oceans okay uh italy either has to use the suez canal or the strait of gibraltar right germany's up at the top russia doesn't have the ports it's a problem these countries have and why they weren't as big in colonial powers right right yeah um like all the colonial powers spain britain portugal france

it's having easy access to the ocean is more important than like what's in your country yeah so mostly he wants to correct this in his mind so he wants to if there's loads he wants to do he wants to take over uh cameroon um uh which is on the bottom of the bulge on africa is that what they call it uh there's the bull because the horn of africa is it's at the bottom i think that's the that's the bottom yeah god we're playing a game about africa we don't know the fucking geography yeah i know where cameroon is i can't describe it on them but uh cameroon is on the atlantic and he wants to have a strip of land that goes through from his libyan colonies through what is either modern day chad or niger to cameroon which would make them an atlantic power right

okay yeah to complete this he also wants to drive the british out of egypt so he can take the suez canal and then in his head the italian uh navy is going to drive the british navy out of the mediterranean not very subtle and humble no and then he wants to conquer gibraltar he's basically imagining the mediterranean as an inland sea and everything around it's italy okay okay well this is kind of going back to his whole recreate the roman empire yes it's kind of reaching back to two things that you couldn't do he wants to both reach back to the roman empire but he also by trying to get cameroon he wants to become a colonial power as they're dying like world war two very much marks the end of colonial path like it takes time for it to die yeah so he's just

behind the ball in multiple ways guys stuck in the past yes well that is a big thing of them looking back they're both stuck in the past and make it up like i don't know if you know you know they're like roman salute yes yeah romans never did it oh okay it's from like an italian film about romans from like the 1930s oh okay so they've just completely they just like nick the symbol but a fake symbol but yeah so by being appointed government general governor of libya this works well for mussolini balbo's out of the public eye he's away from the corridors of power it's sort of an exile but also if he succeeds mussolini gets what he wants so it's like my rival goes off and becomes nothing or i get my like colonial ambitions okay yeah so at this point

balbo's like checked out of fascism because he thinks it's not going hard enough because mussolini keeps compromising with like that pact of pacification i mentioned yes so he's kind of like checked out and but around this time there's loads of talks of cues and stuff and his name's coming up constantly right yeah i was like this is our guy uh his phone's tapped the entire time and mussolini's like jealousy mixes with fear and just turns into like actual hatred apparently um surely not i've not heard he's a spiteful guy no he's a he's a big softy um but he he gets there he does an all right job uh he nationalizes tourism creates the etal and their whole thing is that like they dig up roman amphitheaters and then put shows on in them

it's all the culture stuff they start the triply grand pricks it's a lot like soft power stuff okay yeah um they also create the national coastal road which is the road that runs along the top of the map for us that's like a key strategic thing. Right, okay. That's created during the preceding 10 years before the war by Balbo's efforts. Oh, so Balbo did that?

Yeah. We're on Balbo's road. Yeah. Well, in fact after he died, it was briefly renamed to the Via Balbia. Of course it fucking was. I think it's now being renamed to National Coastal Road again. Good. Because, yeah. Take everything away from him. Yeah.

because he's a weird one because when he arrives in libya he immediately against mussolini's wishes closes down five concentration camps for that had been created for the local population that's interesting that's not what i expected um he also he provides investments in infrastructure but a lot of this is the deportation of local populations and systematic repression i think the thing it's not that he's necessarily against removing the local population he thinks they're like icky and bad press it's not like a moral thing it's like this is the wrong way to go about doing this uh okay yeah so like another example because he likes to put a face on it uh they announced this big policy they're going to make 10 villages for uh arabs and berbers from the

region each village would have like its own mosque its own school social center hospital and they're gonna like build these and it's like presented as a gift what it's actually doing is replacing them all these villages are made in the unfertile land right okay so they move out and he moves italian colonists in so he's got this thing it's less i'm gonna murder them all i'm gonna move them around because people don't want to move to a country where there's concentration camps i mean yes so it's true not a nice guy just viewing it through a different lens i guess so just a side note here this is we're leading up into like sort of 1935 ish yeah yeah uh which from you remember don't know if you remember that was the ethiopian war uh we mentioned during graziani's yes yeah

yeah remember that uh this is the first test for the air force he spent the last sort of 10 years making okay yeah so they go in towards the end of the war deploying almost 400 aircraft at this point the italian air force is made up of 15 transport crafts about nine of which work they have no air-to-air capability at all right okay the the italian air force loses 72 planes and 122 crew with no contest in the air they have total air superiority

but this is when they're like dropping poison and dropping gas out of the planes and stuff but the air force doesn't perform well and this is where both Mussolini and Balbo have this thing of oh we spent all that time doing like showy flights and

like using it as a propaganda arm and stuff we didn't actually get it ready for war ah big yes uh it's just massively underperforms yeah you've done all the showboating but you've not actually made an efficient air force yeah exactly another example of what he's doing in 1938 he tries to organize this big event where he's gonna have almost 2 000 families come over and settle 28 also newly constructed visits this is meant to be a massive publicity campaign but mostly mussolini kills any mention of it in the press which just makes it kind of pointless around this time also i don't know i don't know

if this was confirmed as like an official order but balbo's name is only allowed to appear once per month in newspapers so like what a jealous bastard yeah it's really it's just such bitch moves from everyone so he's doing this and he's also aware like oh i'm gonna have to go to war soon so he's trying to create that infrastructure like that's part of why he builds the road it's tourism building the region up also i need to get my troops from east to west yes yeah um and he's aware because he's there just they're completely unprepared that eastern border is with like the british in egypt is just unsecure and their western borders just wide open uh so he starts sending reports back being like don't don't start a war here and while he's doing all this he's also

throwing insanely lavish parties naturally that get him the nickname african waster what yeah every like his critics are all accusing him of corruption and embezzlement turns out he's just he married a countess and then he's been at like the top of the government for ages he's just a rich guy but it's constantly uh they get accusing him of uh corruption and stuff um and then they actually looked into it um and it came in under budget so they buried the reports so he spends he spends

seven years in Libya as governor the tail end of the Libyan genocide happens in the first few years he's there it doesn't end because of him, it ends because they were kind of done like when we went over the figures they killed and displaced over like 50% of people

so it wasn't will to stop it yeah it was just but that does bring us we're gonna skip ahead a bit to may 26th 1940 which is incidentally i believe the first day of the dunkirk evacuations okay uh the german blitzkriegs roaring across france not quite in paris yet but the parisian government uh the french government have left paris like they know it's gonna fall yes um which is when balbo and the uh marshal of the army uh bagnolia are summoned to the waiting room of the palazzo venencia uh in rome bagdolio surprised to see balbo there at all uh shocked that misalina would even talk to him they enter

his huge cavernous office and this scene is quite funny to me it's described as he's treating them to one of his histrionic poses so they walk in and it's like he's thrust his jaw out his head snapped back his arms are on his waist he started behind his desk trying to look like imposing as possible staring into the middle distance he's trying to aura farm yeah and what i find funny about this is you know he was practicing that look in the mirror like there's something kind of pathetic behind that moment just him by himself being like i look like historical but he says i wish to tell you that yesterday i sent a message to adolf hitler with my written declaration that i do not intend to stand idly by with my hands in my pockets and after june 5th

i am ready to declare war on england oh what a what a cool guy yeah uh i will pick it up next week for the last month of balbo's life wow he's really set on a course there yeah yeah he's yeah he dies less than about a month later um which is actually before the game starts and for us but uh i think he's worth talking about um there'll be some stuff about him and how he relates to the nazis as well as the stuff about his death next week but also he made the road he created the air force yeah that's a big thing the road is i think one of the biggest parts that impact the game yeah i mean i bombed that road today yes take that balbo fuck you you old dead man

but uh yeah he's made an inefficient but flashy air force and he's helped musolini rise to power and then being his worst nightmare that checks out the guy is um i mean famous but uh a monster by his own right oh yes and uh well then the clock's ticking for him oh yeah he's got until next week yeah and then he's gone then he's gone well i hope you know balbo that your legacy was that for us personally anyway we'll talk about you on our podcast and then i'll bomb your road in our board game. I mean, he's quite a forgotten figure that I stumbled across,

I think because after he dies, there's efforts by Mussolini to destroy his legacy to a certain extent. So there's... I found some dark places on the internet trying to find research on fringe fascists. Yeah, I guess you've got to be careful with that because that's not going to look great

on your internet history. No, it's not. Fringe fascist parties. Yeah. Oh, hang on, I mean, this one's currently active in the UK. but yeah we'll go into some of his attitudes towards the pact with the nazis next time uh but yeah i'm sure that'll be thrilling that sounds like a really happy time

it's it's interesting but uh yeah i think uh that's it for well when we're talking about happy times you've got to really pull this one out the bag andy okay because you've been rage baiting me today okay the rage is here it's been baited out okay so now in order to bring us back together as friends we're gonna have to find some common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the wall it's time for some common ground i'm trying the intro i'm recording maybe Okay, common ground

Something phenomenally good Okay This is going to be based on a few assumptions I'm just going to need you to roll with As often happens The Olympics will soon be pointless Okay Because it's all too specific and gene editing exists

And it's going to be I believe a genetically engineered human will run a sub eight second hundred meters that human may already have been born they just don't know it yet yeah so that's coming along so i just think olympics it's it's on its last legs so i'd like to propose either an alternative event or an update to the olympics either way which would be each country picks 15 athletes yeah they're the only want to do the events so you have like a pool of 15 people and then you still do like track and field i'm gonna add some sports in there so football right rugby sevens they're gonna have

to do a cricket test match i'm gonna put some of the martial arts in there power lifting a short middle and long distance run but you can only have the 15 people that you assign so instead of having like he's the best weightlifter it's like you need the best all-around athletes i you know i don't dislike this i think this is actually quite a good idea so it's not the best at each it's like your 15 best it's your team yeah because you might be like he will win us the points for the power lifting but then you've got like a power lifter who has to like play in a cricket test match and i assume be the goalkeeper in a football match or whatever uh so yeah that's the general concept of it's not an athlete for every event now you send your team

and they do all the events are all of the current sports staying in there i think we cut some of them down because i want to put some team sports in there am i right in thinking like skateboarding in the olympics now yeah i'm taking that out i thought as much skateboarding break dancing is coming out oh i think break dancing is a good one to keep in there imagine them having to figure out who's gonna do that yes actually we do need some wild cards because you need now you need a break dancer who's also going to be doing the other sports yes because some of the sports i want to replace fencing i want to replace with i don't know if you've ever seen it it's fucking insane the russian like knight mma no but that sounds it's like three or four people in a ring in night

armor like beating the shit out of each other i've seen that at download festival before yeah they made it an event so i'm adding that um so yeah the olympics is now i guess because there's a test match in there it's gonna be long but uh yeah it's just your 50 best athletes no i think i think we stick with this i think we keep we keep some of the the wild card sports in there but having a team that have to figure this shit out yeah it's gonna be so logistically challenging for these people they're not gonna know what to do no it's gonna put the countries on on on edge yeah and a country might be like we just want to do the best at this one thing but if you want to do like top of the medal table god you're gonna have to win a lot of

different sports with the same people and the way you're gonna have to cherry pick that's going to be unbelievably difficult oh yeah because you're you're concerned of gene editing well that's part of my thing is because it's so broad you can't just have a guy who you've like tuned for one because my fingers all the olympic sports are so like precise skill set if that makes sense yeah you're not going to have yeah you because if you have the person who's the perfect break dancer where do they fit in in a cricket team yeah or like oh you've got the guy who can run 100 meters the fastest he also needs to be able to run around for 90 minutes on a football pitch well that's it it's marathon versus sprint yeah having that endurance of being able to

move around versus the short burst is very different yeah i think that's oh god damn it i fucking hate that you've pulled this out the bag i hate that you've given me a common ground where I'm like, this is just fun from go. God damn it. I was hoping it was going to be one of the worst ones. Oh, hang on. I've got to find some sort of flaw with this. Right.

So where's it going to be held? Where's the first of these going to be held? What's the environment? Well, first one, we're doing a reset. We're doing Greece. Okay. Athens, maybe. Should we just start again?

We're starting the Olympics again. Should we just do the same places in sequence? that's fun because there's like a hundred years of olympics yeah but they're only like you get rid of the corruption stuff yeah at this point it's like well i guess the issue is i'm not sure how many nations have disappeared since the inception of the olympics i mean they held one in nazi germany which isn't a state it's now just germany yeah well that's good all you've got now is a germany that isn't nazi so that's just they can have another go at hosting that's an objective positive yeah yeah we should do that i guess you could go for real historical verisimilitude and

you know let's not just for this year we're gonna we're gonna pick it back up yeah probably not i don't think that's a great idea no i think we just stick with your idea thanks we don't we don't do their idea of gene editing no that's a bad one yeah that's oh it's all bad it's all bad but there's definitely a worst point don't fuck with people's genes i guess yeah that that's that's the message that we want to put out there today there's a lot of ways you can upset people there's a lot of ways you can rage bait a lot of ways you can antagonize your friends but i think one of the worst ways to do that is eugenics oh yeah so if there's anyone out there who's considering getting into eugenics or is an advocate in any way shape or form we decry that

we say no to eugenics we say yes to playing silly board games and a weird wide olympics a team olympics well i would say we we're advocates for team olympics we're advocates for being subtle humble and brave but i think apart from that you already know the rest you know what to do with your lives be good people live a full and fruitful life why are you laughing i'm giving good advice i'm being a nice person it's a weirdly sincere sign off all right well all right i guess a silly sign off then uh watch out for you oh what was that fucking program i proposed do you remember the bbc common ground oh for the the raffle for putting a show on yeah it was something about fucking baked beans i think well it clearly left an impression that's the kind of

common ground i was hoping for one where i can really just sit back and go no this is bullshit but no i'm i've got nothing bad to say andy i think you've just you've pulled out the bag once again you've impressed me with your your social prowess thanks you've got your finger on the pulse of everything going on olympic wise and that's something i've always said about you i'm a bit I'm a futurologist. I know. That's such a good job. Let's take this one off

before I get angry at you again. I'm James. I'm Andy. Stay subtle, humble, and brave. And good night. We'll be right back.