War With A Mate - Episode 43: Plain Sailing

Episode Date: September 28, 2025

They’ve flown to the skies, they’ve crossed the seas - they’ve had a significant technical hiccup. What can’t the guys say they didn’t do this week? James’ air mastery comes into question while Andy turns his eye to devastating the 4th CCNN. The longest telegram to date is received jam-packed with questions, in this, the longest (and latest) episode to date! We hear more of ABC’s nautical adventures, and it’s all wrapped up by a rather unique Common Ground. Big up Meatface! The temporary Merch Store is still up until the end of September for those that wish to obtain a novelty item:https://war-with-a-mate.printify.me

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or wherever you get your podcasts and now we're off hello ah there we go howdy how's it going it's going well this is what's this one again war with a mate war with a mate that's the one yes it's war with a mate with uh i'm andy oh yeah yeah you look different i am i've shaved quite a lot of hair off you have You've still got some lovely locks Yeah, I need to do a second pass I would like to have hair like yours I'm James, by the way

Like a sort of weird fro I don't know, you've got sort of like a nice curly look to it It's got some nice curls I've got a bit of salt and pepper going on Yeah But it's not curly It doesn't have texture, that's the issue Well, you should layer it

If I just had my hair as is, it is just flat. Like, if I didn't... I don't think you've ever seen my hair in its natural state. Not, like, gelled? Yeah. Like, not with something in. You used to have it, like, long and straight, like, just before I met you. Yeah, I don't think you ever saw it in the flesh, though.

I think you might have had long hair for a bit. i had a bit of a paul mccartney thing going on i think when i first met you yes it wasn't like shoulder length but it had some volume yeah it was like paul mccartney and the beatles in like the maybe like 70s or 80s where it's just like this big bull cut that kind of got out of hand it's because i got a cut and i just let it grow out didn't do anything to it i mean that's what i do with mine that's a good point yours goes out though yeah mine just got strange i have realized i leave the left hair side is slightly longer and i've realized it's because i'm right-handed oh see what i'm shaking oh do you do that yourself yeah oh that actually

turned out really well oh thanks it also explains i like how there was a sweet spot where it's like i'm not gonna mention it because if it was a professional cut they fucked it it also explains why there's a little bit of hair in your kitchen uh yes i did it in the kitchen oh oh the food place that's interesting because you do have a bathroom but i can't get electricity in there oh my god thank you there we go no i can't reach i can't get from a socket to plug the razor in you don't have a wireless razor no oh my god that's that's right we're not getting back into this two weeks in a row i'm not getting back if you're if you're going to hurt yourself in some sort of electrical fire that's that's on you man that's not my responsibility what is my

responsibility however is talking about the campaign for north africa so should we do that it is it is that's what we'll talk about it's the game that we're playing that's why you're here you know that we're playing the game you know that we're waxing philosophical about why we're playing the game it's because it's a long game and we want to do that because we've got nothing better to do and we're part way through now we may as well finish the damn thing then to upstage that's right we are really digging into digging into it we've made i think we made a good uh good dent in upstage two today yeah i feel felt like a real tortoise was the hair one where i didn't feel like we were doing much and then i looked back and i was like

oh no we've done like half an upstage we did we made some solid uh solid changes did all the bootkeeping did all the bootkeeping you know what i really struggle to not say solid progress and i feel like i say it all the fucking time so i really have to catch myself saying solid progress yeah and you need to start throwing stuff at me whenever i say that because you know what it just it completely dilutes the meaning of it if it's the same every time but we yeah we did some stuff we'll say that did some stuff where do we start off we started off with water distribution which is a behind the scenes admin which we'll pick up through the week it means that we don't have to spend our time today sat opposite each other filling out spreadsheets when now we just assign

ourselves homework yeah much better yeah that's great i'd love taking this game home with me that's fun so that part was um abstracted we don't need to worry about the troops on the ground just yet because we weren't moving them we never got to movement uh today that never came up what we did manage to do is the fine minutiae of aircraft well before that we did uh you did the first construction oh i did i built something today you made a a real old dummy supply dump i did sure which is for me to know and you to find out yes construction is something we've not actually dabbled in yet and it felt like a sort of half-arsed one because construction in the game it's a whole segment which we haven't actually got to before what we've got to it every time

we've got to it though we've just went well it's too costly to build anything let's not well i was thinking of building something last turn but then the hot weather doubles all the requirements uh yes all the water requirements like shoot up yeah same with rainstorm because we've had fairly bad weather yeah it turns out the desert is not a predictable weather pattern you can't build stuff there yeah i don't know why it actually explains why there's not much stuff in the desert sort of why it's a desert i suppose otherwise it's just vegas or dubai deserts with a mall on them deserts where you can lose all your cash stationary cruise ships that's a very nuanced way to describe those cities but i can't disagree that's what they are

well i built a bit of a bit a little bit of a vegas i built a supply dump that's what i went for and i started some risky construction of my own you did uh very very risky construction because of the tenuous situation your men are in yes because uh i've decided to fortify the road i should probably have done it earlier but the top of the road where i've had the fourth indian camped i was like i'm gonna try and put some uh put some fortification here but that does take three op stages if they spend their cpa for any reason the construction stops you have a division about i'm estimating two or three op stages away so if they get in there and bombard and manage to get them the construction's over and i lose the resources

i put into it yes i think yes let's let's let me let me paint everyone a picture so the northern road of north africa along the libyan and egyptian border there is a conflict of brewing and along that northern road you have the fourth indian division which is your group of men to the the right on the side of egypt and over to the left across the border to libya i have three divisions or division-sized groups which are marching along an unfinished road yeah so that's just clear is basically the default tile it is yeah so it's just sort of uh clear sand along coastal stretches and these three divisions are marching their way along there's an unfinished road which can be constructed we can choose to build that and they are yeah about two op stages away from

getting to you and there's nothing in between and if i get past your fourth indian division I then reach the constructed portion of the road, at which point I can just ride that road straight down to Mersa Matruh and then follow that along to Cairo, Alexandria. It's bad news if I get there. Yes. And you're trying to fortify the position,

which means that you have huge benefits in close assault. So if I get anywhere near you and you're fortified, it's going to cause some real hassle for me. But the timescale that you're working on is construction, finishing, and three op stages. I'll be there in two. yes which i can decide not to involve them in the fight you can and they won't spend cpa but it costs cpa to get bombarded so if you pick pick the right infantry that i've assigned to it

all that construction just ends all it takes is me dropping some howitzers on the right people and that construction is over and the close assault becomes a nightmare for you yes because you are massively outnumbered and the current conflict that we have going a little further south of that against the fourth black shirts that is your only real backup that you can have but your men are locked into a fight because you're trying to snuff out the fourth black shirts which escalated a little bit further today yes um so i'll just keep it in order yeah so we had the construction which we've we've done uh the supply dump that i built is a nice way station for me to drop off some supplies i'm trying to re-fortify my supply network which as you may

know if you've been listening fell apart very early on in the game i'm trying to recoup that i'm trying to rebuild and resupply those men with a steady stream of ammo food water and fuel so building that supply dump was a good way to do that it also means if i do push past the fourth indian division i can then quite comfortably fuel that supply line and just march all the way down that road yeah i'm gonna i mean i'll have to sort of hold you there but there's a few places where i can do a sort of fighting retreat there are there are but nonetheless you're going to lose i mean yeah you have quarter of a million men and i have 30 000 yeah i'm running the numbers on that that's not that's not good for you at all shocking that the italians lost in real life

yeah we know why we've listened to the history segments we know who was behind all of this and they were not i think the most sound-minded of men yeah and then operation compass yeah well some actual tactical play on part of the commonwealth as well played a huge part yeah they're better generals i'd say i would be inclined to agree in several aspects they were which is now risking for me because what they managed to overcome numerical odds and their superiority was tactical genius, but I have to provide that myself. You've got a bit

of tactical, maybe not genius, but savantship? I'll take that and the hidden backhanded idiot that went before it. Well, I didn't say that part out loud, so you can't be angry at me. I can. I can project whatever the hell I want

onto you. Ah, that's what happens when you give this man a microphone. He comes alive, and he becomes angry. well construction wrapped up and following that construction we then took to looking at our our air stuff our our planes our bombers our fighters and we put together a few missions and my my supplies and my airfields are they're running real low i was able to get together some ammunition for some of my fighters which can strafe and i was able to that was a nasty strafe it was i was able to get some bombs in as well i've got enough bombers that i could go for a bombing mission

so i got some fighters to strafe the fourth indian division yeah lost a toe you did you lost a toe a toe point that is which is a hundred men not a single single digit yeah not not a single extremity and i also then dropped a bombing run which is to be resolved still because i'm trying to bomb another portion of that road that i've just mentioned which is along the northern coast um which i guess if i do win it's detrimental to me but in the interim it's bad for you because it breaks your supply chain to the fourth indians yes so that will be resolved next session because turns out you've got an airfield nearby which i always forget about at mercer mature it's the same one that i had trouble with several weeks ago and you've scrambled two squadrons to try

and try to do three two of them got two of them got off yeah because uh i don't know if we've mentioned scrambling there's a table if you're going one to two hexes you definitely do it three to four it's more likely um you need to roll a five or lower and then that goes out to 15 yeah 15 hexes for a scramble is scary i really don't like that 10 to 15 i think you get with a 10 to 15 hexes you can fly so yes uh turns out you've got squadrons ready to go did not factor that into my plan so the bombing run may be hindered somewhat however i hope i take out that part of the road really fucks your trucks and that's what we do here we fuck the trucks you however have bombing missions of your own uh yes i've bombed and also strafed the fourth

black shirts yes the strafe missed completely very happy to see that happen yeah the bombing went very successful and you've pinned four of my battalions which is a lot of the division i'm guessing it's 400 men it was four out of seven infantry battalions not 400 men that's four toe points four oh yeah sorry even more yeah because each one will be so i'm guessing between five and ten toe points you see i mean yeah you're looking at you've pinned thousands of men with these bombs yes so yeah i guess i'll not give away how many toe points each one consists of but you've pinned thousands of men collectively i don't i don't love that at all it means that they're stuck they are up shits creek without a paddle and you've boxed them in with your men i think the

it's the seventh armored division that's there isn't it yes they are going to cause some havoc for the fourth black shirt they are gonna kill them they are going to ideally they are probably going to kill i'm not going to really sugarcoat it they're going to really fuck them up the only thing is it really depends on how risky you play this because you could sit there and you could whittle them down to their last numbers and kill them completely but that would mean sitting there for the next four or five op stages while you whittle them down. I don't think it's going to take that. I think it would take that

because I have reinforcements nearby. Oh, I think you can get them done this op stage. All of them? Yes. I don't think so. If my thing is double yours, you get a huge bonus. And it was four and seven last time and I've pinned.

Hmm. Yeah. Actually running those numbers. Yeah, I don't love that actually. Also, from what you said, they're pretty low on ammo. I don't remember saying that. You did. I remember you saying it. Whereas for me, the 7th have like one and a half going hams in them left. Thank God we don't record a podcast every week to document whatever I said.

That way there's no way to know who's right or wrong. I mean, I'm certainly not going to listen to it. I don't have that luxury. I have to edit this, so I have to listen to them back. And unfortunately, I know that I definitely said that, and it is true. Ah, shucks. it's not ideal it's not the best thing that could happen this week certainly not but it happens that's that's life that's war and the only real saving grace that i have today aside from the fact i have so many men marching along the north road is the fact that we looked at repair rules

properly yes uh i've got a bit of bootkeeping to catch up on because we've decided well yeah you've got all of yours we've not been doing it so uh you moved them and sort of caught up on some turns we thought it was worth allowing us to like correct the mistake as it were yeah so what we've done is we've retroactively moved what we are retroactively moving i've had a pretty thorough database of all my broken down shit so we've we've retroactively moved them to the repair facilities they would have got to by this point but it's only from this turn this op stage that we're going to start the repair process at the facilities so in essence i've got a huge backlog of stuff needing repair that's been there for two or three op stages in some instances but

i'm only now starting to repair them the end of this op stage to keep some aspect of fairness since we are playing catch-up it means that neither of us end up with a huge massive backlog of replacement points and extra trucks that are just ready to roll out instead we're paying for our mistakes of sloppiness with the repair rules which we only really got some clarity on a few weeks ago so that has given me a lot more trucks and also as of next upstage the end of the next towing phase i will have well this this phase actually um this upstage is towing phase i'm going to have seven tow points of tanks ready into brook to be repaired oh that's nasty which is a However, looking at the repair table, it's actually very unlikely I get all of them.

I think it's like 25% is what I'm likely going to get. 33% on a good roll. Because you can't get 100 outside of major cities, can you? So a temp one, you can't. It's in a major city, but it is temporary. And because of the fortification level, that also drops the rating, I believe. I'll have to re-consult the table. I haven't done any repairs yet, so I haven't given it a real granular look.

but that seems to be the case. So that's not, it's not the best thing in the world, but it's going to be a game changer for me because a lot of what I'm repairing are trucks. And as you know, I'm low on trucks. Those trucks will be primarily on a mission to resupply my airfields so I can start doing some more horrible air stuff to you

because that is really where I shine. Yeah. Yeah, I've been, I don't want you to get your air superiority back. as this wave of divisions hits? It would be a disaster. Yes. Because realistically, my first thing to do would be

strafe and or bomb the 4th Indians, trapping them and picking off their toe points, ready for my divisions to show up, stamp on them, and then just march their way along east to Mercer Matruh. Because when I hold Mercer Matruh, which will happen, and I still hold Siwa, which will continue to happen... Yeah, I'm not taking Siwa.

That means that if I just hold those positions, I've won the scenario when it comes to a close. Yes. So it's not going to be that difficult to pull off. No, I think you will get this. I think you will get this scenario. I've got some stuff, but I think it's going to be tricky stuff playing off.

Yeah. My real fear is that I hold Mersa Matruh, I hold Siwa, and then I have to continue holding it. And that's going to become the scary part of the game when I have to hold down a position that I've already captured because I feel like it's going to be

a completely different ballgame. I mean, yeah, the defense is quite different. I do have a bunch of units arriving. I've got a couple of tank regiments incoming this turn, which should help. Well, my plan, hopefully, to outline it for you is to hold Mercer Matru by the end of turn four and then just keep it fortified for turns five and six.

Yeah. that that's the goal that is the the picture i've now painted it's crazy to think i now actually have a strategy that extends all the way through to the end of the scenario yeah i don't really have that um it doesn't feel like not to sort of rain on your parade it doesn't feel like you've made progress towards the objective so to speak you've taken a real strong stance on i mean i really fucked it with the fourth black shirts i put them out there on a limb what it has done is distracted your seventh armor division in a way that i definitely didn't design but it's been kind of a godsend because if i didn't realize i had those extra divisions and you moved them

further north i could have had some real trouble so instead it's created this again savant situation where i've ended up in a really good spot by chance so you've not really made any march towards the objectives because of that no i think what i've been doing is fuck it fuck the trucks obviously uh i'm just trying to stop you getting set up to launch but i think because we both missed those divisions yeah it changed them sort of materializing i think benefited you more than the turn you weren't using them yeah i mean like it does change things hugely because we were playing off the idea that i had half the divisions up there than i did so it's it means that when it comes to the main game which we will get to again for the the

unaware this is a practice we're playing six turns as a practice run and then we're getting to the full thing and now i feel like when we do under the full thing it's going to be a very different situation oh i guarantee you it will look completely different i think it's going to be a very bloody affair in the first few turns and first few upstages compared to this uh yeah well i think we'll both be more like confident as it were with what units are capable of where you can send them yes keeping them supplied because after the first few upstages i was thinking wow if this is how careful we're taking it in the practice imagine how slow we'll be in the main game but i think it's going to be the complete inverse i wouldn't describe my play

as careful i i would say relative i think you could have definitely went harder it would have been it would have been riskier i i'm currently thinking i've been too aggressive in particular with the seven i think with the seventh yes but i was with the fourth as well yeah i feel like they are both our guinea pigs when it comes to aggression which is kind of bad for me because they're my elite yes and the fourth are one of my elites as well um i've got another two black shirt divisions on the way remember they're not even here yet yeah like moving over from tripoli on there i think this might be the turn they arrive at yeah and then they'll shoot up along that coast road um i do need to motorize them

oh good that is a that is a plan i have i do have the trucks for it you've got the trucks to motorise a division. Yes. Really? Yes. I just need to empty out the trucks and then I can motorise pretty much everything in there.

Oh, and run light on supplies, like, supply dump. Okay, that makes more sense. Yeah, my plan would be... And then un-mechanise them when they're close enough and stock them up.

Unload them at either Benghazi, Tobruk or Bardia and then fill the trucks up with supplies and then move into whatever the front is at that point yes so that is my rough plan for them i just need to figure out the numbers make sure i've definitely got the right amount of trucks there's a lot of trucks that come from that direction so i need yeah double check those i can definitely do at least one of the divisions so i might just do that with one of them and then have one slowly trail along yeah so there's there's plenty of options i've got for them i'll be honest i think

i'm sitting pretty without them no i think you are yeah which is crazy to think um was that everything that we did today that we did the fleet phase which because they'd already bombarded i just moved the counters yes you move them back to alexandria but there's nothing much yeah not much because they fired on the first op stage which means op stage two and three they need to basically they can fire once per turn yes yeah so we did the refitting uh we did the adjustment for water well we've got that ready to go and yeah the air stuff um yeah it you know what we didn't have any sort of rule queries today which is rare usually we have to check at least one thing in the rules the only thing we did have to look at were the

tow things but it was just really to check how many cpa they get because we thought it was 10 it is 10 that was it though i don't think we actually had to check any rules today which is crazy i think we've got i think we're the most comfortable with the organization phase at the minute because it's by rope basically it's just apply this subtraction i think we're both comfortable with the air stuff because personally for me it feels fairly intuitive it is i think the air stuff is good it's it's happening every op stage it's also fun which makes it a lot easier to get through because it it has immediate payoff i thought the one i thought the resolving air combat one plane versus one plane at a time would get really slow

yeah but it's very quick to resolve each one once you get into a flow it is and uh i think that table's balanced nicely um to give like a sense of drama where if you've got the overwhelming advantage you will probably down the other plane yes but because the plane that's weaker goes first there's always a chance that they get off a lucky shot kills the ace or like so there is the tension there so i'm yeah i think weirdly i think the of the sort of three pillars of the game my enjoyment currently is air game logistics land combat uh yes that's fair enough oh uh i would go logistics last mostly because of the trouble i've had with the trucks it's not that it's not fun and again that's

a scary thing to say because there was a time when i absolutely despised the idea of it i do have an aspect of enjoyment with it even though my truck stuff is going pretty bad i just think it's yeah it pales in comparison to the other stuff the land combat for me is now fun i was saying this just before we hit record um i really enjoy now that it feels like there's a way to it it feels like we're actually trying to get ground it feels like we're trying to push each other back or hold our own instead of it being a case of well we're just kind of fighting each other for the sake of it because that's what it felt like for a long time it felt like it was just

have a skirmish for the sake of a skirmish because we were trying to figure out what's okay and what isn't getting an understanding that most combat is going to be prolonged yeah like it's not position position

decisive moment like two divisions could be in contact for like I can see in down the future two like big heavy hitting divisions that are fairly evenly matched

spending like two turns potentially like whittling each other away you whittle me away it's not a good thing you whittle down my patience that's not very nice

trying to talk about the land combat I don't want to talk about the land combat let's just do some listener mail bad attitude man they're sending mail Andy they're sending mail for you and I to read so I think we should read it oh

wow that's a hot take horrible thing to say we spent like 12 episodes begging people to send in emails and now that they're sending in the emails you don't want to fucking read them oh no I just checked uh our recording thing i didn't realize we'd been talking for half an hour oh yeah yeah i guess we would just get into it wow you really are you've got weird time dilation going on when you record

this uh i'm just overall today i think oh you're having a bad one not bad just untethered from time that's a bad day that's a really bad day you should always be anchored in linear time you're not a time lord i mean this is gallifrey i wish you wish you lived on gallifrey yeah then we could spend all our time doing this and it's not a meaningful part chunk of our lives it's just a thing we did once yeah but if this wasn't a meaningful chunk of our lives it kind of defeats the point the reason that this is a cool thing right that's not the right word cool is incorrect yeah the reason that this is a noteworthy thing is because it's taken up far too much time okay so time lord podcasts suck because they're immortal so there's no stakes yeah that's why

you know that's why short-lived podcasts don't go anywhere okay you were right let's read some mail so speaking of short-lived we've got a very long email yes the email comes from josh now josh has bestowed upon us a lot of questions so we'll we'll just get through this one email i reckon uh yes and what we'll do you usually would read the whole thing and then respond to the question at the end or the two questions but since it looks like there's about 10 here i guess we'll do some some rapid fire answers as we go i also think 10 was a very um undershot i think there's more than 10 we'll get to them so josh writes gentlemen fuck the trucks and i will burn cairo to the ground that's both our catchphrases yeah i'm not sure which side you're rooting for here

josh in the game i yeah i think i know which one you're rooting for in real life i hope uh i also don't advocate burning cairo to the ground for what it's worth uh a pleasure to send queries comments and critiques your brand of insanity slash competition is right up my alley i truly hope they'll have my doubts to follow you two on your journey decades into the future i deeply appreciate this podcast no one asked for well thank you and i hope about the you don't think that you'll follow us into the future i hope that means you know you're not doubting your own lifespan i hope maybe you just think that you'll become disinterested and disenchanted with us because it gets worse i hope neither of them happens i hope you live forever and you're always

interested again with the fucking time lord stuff man i deeply appreciate this podcast no one asked well it's clear your friendship is real and true oh no it's completely synthetic my friend we don't even know each other really yeah this is a sort of uh x factor boy band situation we are the one direction of hex and camera put together simon cowell put this together and simon cowell will tear it apart you even each other out and keep accountability with grace always a pleasure to listen to there is a litany of questions below feel free to answer at least all of them i like it it's subtle it's humble it's definitely brave um andy should we do one for one you read the first one yeah sure uh a huge aspect of board games is replayability how does it feel to only

play a game once even though it seems incredibly repetitive is there any weirdness to playing a game precisely once well that's interesting because i mentioned this to you a couple weeks ago when we were stood over the table and you know stood there basking in its glory hands on hips chuckling and chortling and i said it's strange that we just get one more iteration of this this stage of the game we get to see one more time and then after that that's it there's no more it is a unique experience for board games or like even a lot of video games that like you have a long thing like i'm thinking like civilization you might have like 100 hours for a game yeah but you will play like another one yeah or like in other board games it's like oh i'm gonna try

something oh it didn't work i'm gonna be like on the back foot or like losing for the next 45 minutes yeah but there's stuff to like learn from it for the next time i play this time is no no you got one shot you got a little demo bit we get to do twice but it's like they it could all come down to like oh i thought that would work and it didn't and now i'm gonna spend 80 turns aka 12 years paying for that mistake and i never get to apply the fix again yeah you never get to go back and amend that mistake You never get to go back and reapply whatever you learned in turn 53 to what you would do in turn 1 again.

Yeah, there's no... There's no do-over. If you make a mistake, you live with that mistake. It is the one and only mistake. Which is, I think, quite a unique thing for any game I've played. I think what it will be is psychologically damaging. Oh, yeah. We get to learn this experience, we get to know what we did wrong,

and we can never change it. It's sort of like having... Like life. yeah it's like having another life except it's all in the theater of war so yeah it's definitely weird the second question is can you replay a specific stage if the game breaks is there enough record keeping in place to attempt a temporal retreat into a playable state so i would say in essence yes there is because we are going to be keeping a lot of bookkeeping mostly to make sure we haven't got anything wrong but ultimately in theory our bookkeeping should be good enough

that we can essentially pick up on any turn yes that's the idea behind the bookkeeping that is not we've done a couple of those like shifts for like if a rule's been completely wrong or like well look at the repair stuff today yeah or a unit's been in the wrong place like uh we had the first one where i had a unit behind your lines and it turned out it should have been on map d not map c yes when you first took out an sgsu that was a subject of that so i think we'll try to have them but i think we want to be catching them as quickly as possible rather we don't i don't think i could handle being right we'll take back like the last 10 turns yeah i think it's more case of we haven't really applied a rule yet in this practice room we're a bit more fast and loose

with it we'll probably have to sit down and have a definitive chat about what that looks like in the full game i personally wouldn't say anything more than a the previous play session because i think if we start going back further than that it becomes a whole other ordeal of having to wreck on these huge changes yeah and also part of the experience we are gonna fuck some stuff up um yeah we are gonna do some stuff wrong it's kind of part of the game the fact that it's just two of us playing it means that there's so little oversight making those mistakes will be part of the experience i think and there's no like i've talked about this before there's not really the google resource so a lot of it is like yeah we might make it get it wrong but it's not like

we've ignored stuff yes as long as it's just a sort of a mistake where someone has overlooked something maybe they've not maybe they're not utilized three divisions they had and then they can start moving them afterwards that's fair enough but if it's the case that one of us turns around and goes oh i actually had uh all of these bombers that can actually uh use torpedoes and i've never used torpedoes i would like to do that four turns ago tough you've missed the time to do that we have to just move on oh there'll be no going back for like i missed this yes because that's that's part of the game is and as for the you've messed your boot keeping up and there were a flight of bombers that you didn't use for the whole thing yeah if it's decision general yes um

as for um if the game breaks we don't really know what that might look like and the game may break we will just have to cross that bridge when we get to it that could be years down the line and it'll be exciting when it happens um andy next one do you think the history sections will give you tactical advantages in the game will you be able to institute slash avoid real life folly slash triumphs uh i think it probably will i think to an extent i've definitely looked at the game differently after hearing the history segments that you've provided yeah i do look at it through a different lens which is bizarre but because it is meant to be a simulation of the whole thing it does feel like there is some credence to the sort of warnings of history also

i wasn't particularly into military history at all like even the history i was into wasn't like armies and tactics and stuff so it's just adding that as well to like things i've like learned like the just tactics i wouldn't and also i think it will be helpful because they've tried to simulate it pretty closely um knowing um what people fucked up on yes like rommel could have taken egypt but his supply lines were absolute shit and if you look at it slightly closer it's like kind of couldn't have taken egypt and maybe isn't as good a general oh i guess yeah in that case if he fucked his supply lines the answer is no i haven't learned anything from these history sections um the next one is um is there a vision of adding more players to speed it

up even if you get one more player each to help once a month uh or does that or does the learning curve slash friend roster prohibit that um i guess friend roster bit of both bit of both now the learning curve it means that we have to have somebody sit in training for four months learning the rules then they have to be ingratiated into the current situation of the game which probably means us sitting them down briefing them on all of our spreadsheets having them listen to every episode prior so they're up to date with everything that's happened um it's one i think logistically impossible and two sort of defeats the point of this to an extent we set off with just the two of us it feels like cheating at the game i don't know it feels like cheating it's just like

i don't know like i don't know anyone else who would commit to this i don't know that there's anyone else i trust with this because you need we need to be able to like come around once or twice a week to my house and hang out for like 10 plus hours a week yeah it's a lot also we need to commit to the game so it's it's not a huge venn diagram and the people i know you sort of have to be there from the start so it's a nice idea that someone would help but i just don't think they can uh does the practice round have any carry over to the actual game only in life experience yes a tremendous amount and oh i fucked this up oh this should have been done better uh not in terms of like the winner gets an advantage or anything no we start again from scratch when the scenario

is over we start again from the very beginning the only thing we carry with us are our regrets what level of guardianship do you feel to help others trying to play i guess kind of touched on that there i feel a very strong sense of guardianship um gatekeeping comes to mind massively so but i do want to if people want to give it a go i'd send them the spreadsheets and stuff like oh if someone else wanted to do this then yes absolutely in terms of like guardianship on our game yes massive guardianship on our game if anyone else wants to try this i think that's hilarious by all means give it a go it'd be very funny to see how someone else gets on with this but just yeah not at our table but at your own absolutely go for it um just bear in mind what

you're getting into it's not a good idea and maybe at the end of this we release all the document templates and whatnot and rule addenda uh that speeds up the bookkeeping and someone can play in a couple hundred hours instead of a couple thousand which is a crazy are you treating the rules as a living document are you inserting slash editing rules as you go uh we do have our own addenda and our own rulings on certain things yes that's more case of clarifying ambiguous rules more so than it is making up our own we feel like the game the game is designed as you can probably tell by now very carefully there's just some stuff that because of how complicated it is it seems like there's gaps in it either there's gaps or we just can't find

the information in the minutiae of the text no i i do i do think there was more and it got cut so there are mentions of things but yeah it's just clarity we're not adding our own rules or anything i'm having a look through this there's still so many questions should we maybe pick up one more and then uh maybe we just have to split this in two parts because god we've got we've got a hell of a lot from you there josh um and we've uh they've all started a bit of conversation so if you read this it'll be a three-hour episode yeah these are really good questions by the way really enjoy this email this is a hell of a good one um tell you what then yeah should we do one more um so what else we got here um does the practice scenario cover every part slash mechanic

of the game or is there new mechanics to discover as you play um yes there are still more mechanics there are i mean the germans first of all the germans are not in the practice scenario they don't come around till i think turn 30 or 40 so they're not even in the game there's the 10th chariot flotilla raid that you can do at some point but not in this scenario I can do once in the whole game I have the SAS

yes and the Lafayette commanders I have Rommel you have Rommel, you have your own version of the long range desert group that becomes available at some point

I've not really even jumped into the commonwealth production stuff at all yeah there is a ton of stuff that we actually haven't got to touch on as well as that we've got stuff like construction which i've only kind of skimmed a little bit today so there's mechanics that are available currently which we may not even get to use uh probing we haven't done no neither of us have probed neither of us have done any reserve stuff or scouting um i think that is probe i think oh no patrol patrol sorry is what it is yes patrol probe because yeah there's mechanics that are like locked behind certain game turns and also some mechanics we've just chosen like i've looked at probing and it's

like a half attack and i've not really seen an instance where i should be doing that yeah there's a ton of different stuff that we haven't actually got around to doing yet either through choice or game restriction but i'm excited to see how that manifests either in the scenario or maybe it's stuff that we only pick up in 15 years yeah you know it's hard to say at this point but yeah a ton of stuff goes back to that first one just to loop it round of playing again it's like could be on turn 57 and then it's like reserves i should have done my entire strategy around reserves or like i should be doing probes or like every turn like just don't know i might do some reserves this turn you know this op stage uh well thank you very much for the email we've got

plenty more of that so we will pick that up next time some brilliant questions in there very thought-provoking very retrospective introspective and uh future-spective i don't know if that's a word but if it's not i've coined it add it to the dictionary i am a wordsmith i am a genius so however retrospective that means yes going back to the past here we go i am recording uh-oh that didn't go exactly to plan i had a bit of a whoopsie sorry guys i i messed up it's tomorrow fuck wow the rest of the rest of that audio that was all yesterday we've got audio today now yes ah it would seem not all of that got recorded did it no we had a little bathroom break and then i came back and did the history segment on the common ground but

didn't press record again yeah so we nearly just had a section where it's me listening actively to your history segment giving some oh and then common ground with your choir tones in the background egging you on so i'm willing to wager this episode might be out a little late so if if that is the case apologies now you know why this little little uh easter egg in the middle is giving away some behind the curtain action and we've made a whoopsie sorry guys but we're here we're here and you're still going to get history segment and you're still going to get common ground we'll just rehash it a little bit better late than never hopefully no they don't want it at all andy oh no if it's late it's never well i suppose we should get into the history segment

now i have spoilers a little now i guess but if anything i just feel like i'm in on the action i know what comes next watching your favorite film or second time yeah just don't ask me to recap it because i won't be able to do it as well as you i was gonna yeah try and hand me the history yeah uh but no we're continuing andrew brown cunningham abc what a guy abc one two three i said that last time didn't i yes it's a pavlovian um quote from him from the purely service point of view i doubt very much of the boa war didn't be much good all the same one could never regret it i'm willing to bet some people would have regretted that a lot of people involved he describes some pretty rough shit

where it'd be like it's interesting you don't regret it but he does give us reasoning why at the end yeah that's true I guess I know what comes which is why I think that statement is now even more baroque than ever but when we last left him he was jumping on a ship

with his friend Colt to go and serve on the fox in South Africa that's a wolf actually not a fox continue well he's on a ship called the doris um the cast of which is like a sort of agatha christie murder on the orient express mystery novel it's a real whodunit it is you've got two naval cadets

a vice admiral admiral an entire theater company a collection of musical acts a comedian Cecil Rhodes Who created Rhodesia What a stacked cast Yeah, and it's also transporting Captain Provero A massive man of a jet black beard Known as Provero the Bard

Who's going to be their captain When they get down there So Captain Poirot is on the Orient Express Yes, who also has the Nomic You know what I mean I don't, I don't know what this word is He has the name The Bard

oh yes i know i know the word you're trying to say now nom de pleu that's not it is it nom de pleu i don't know oh my god let's not get lost in the weeds on this i guess on this on the ship who is gal gadot playing oh um it's probably gonna have to be one of the music hall artists or someone from the theater company yeah probably enough champagne to fill the nile let's not cast her for anything yeah actually let's grab that she's she's not part of the pod but part of the fun on the way down is uh they have a chess tournament going uh which he describes as this i eventually found myself in the final of the chess tournament the over finalist being cecil rhodes i had difficulty in getting him to play him to play it off as he always

fobbed me off by asking if i had learned the moves yet however one afternoon i played and beat him after a fierce struggle there was still one game and it was two or three days before i eventually got him to the post we finally played after dinner and i had his queen in four moves which finished it i think he had dined well and i i don't know if that's a bit of a sort of allusion to the fact he's a little bit a little bit tipsy or if it's just that the guy's full yeah he might be trying of power through the meat sweats which to be fair is not a good place to be conducive for chess no it does not provide the mental fortitude you think it would it's not really brain food there isn't a bit in the queen's gambit where she eats several kilos of beef and then plays a tournament well

i've seen the queen's gambit have you no actually i'm guessing that is there a big beef eating scene you were in fact correct andy there is not a beef indulgence scene well there you go that's probably why i didn't get a second season wasn't it just that her life's let's again we need to be a bit down when we do these and we get on tangents yeah if we're not tired then we go on tangents i'm reinvigorated it's a new day let's play the game no uh so they arrive in cape town uh the fox which he's going to serve on is away at the time uh it's going to be back in a couple of weeks so they're taken to the flagship doris uh which our man prof row is the captain of it's a second class cruiser which means it has like armored decks but not armor along the side and it's still using

sails these will become obsolete over the sort of next decade with the improvements and ships leading up to world war one like all metal turbines that kind of thing no more fun tall ships no uh which seems good they seem to be pretty horrible to actually serve i would imagine it's very bouncy on the water oh yeah well i'll give you an example of what it's like living on this one it's incredibly uncomfortable they have 29 midshipmen and cadets uh living in a room that's intended for 15 people just doing the math there that's uh that's nearly double yes 30, basically, for the most part, teenage boys in a cramped space for months Well, that's going to stink

Yeah, that room Adding to that is the meals are bad Because the price of food's high So anything that's not just, like, base level They have to pay extra for So they're just going for box standard, I imagine Well, yes, because he describes his pay this way our pay as cadets was one shilling a day plus a compulsory allowance of 50 pounds a year

or four pounds three shillings four pence a month that's not a whole that's not much at all it's not so he's very happy when his actual ship that he's been posted to the fox arrives back it's smaller but it's less crowded there's only eight of them in the gun room this time instead of 30 and he's also been promoted from naval cadet to midshipman he got his paperwork signed on the doris by captain proffero uh stating that he conducted himself with sobriety and attention to his duties has kept a log uh so he's got a promotion which is an extra three pence a day hey i mean you know these things add up moving up in the world yeah although he's not gonna get to keep a hold of that because i see his duty as assistant

to the navigator who's a man called henry l dicks who teaches them navigation and piloting and stuff and they get good at it but they have to pay him for this privilege so they're paying him three pence a day for tuition which seems a bit of a seems like a harsh system that like you're in the navy and you have to also pay the navy well a guy in the navy so the british have always been getting shafted by tuition fees is what i'm hearing yeah they're like built in on a like institutional level yeah we've got a lot of that in britain yeah uh apparently it used to be more oh so it went down it used to be your parents have to like provide i think it was like 50 odd quid which back then that's a lot yeah well they are officers as well ah that's a good point yeah

these are people who are well off because he comes from a good family like wealthy and renowned but fortunately uh well he describes that here uh what his uh tutor did with his money uh he became entitled to three pence a day automatically deducted from our pay of nine for the naval instructor it was a inquisitive system which began in the early 18th century whereby midshipmen and uh seagoing ships or wherever their parents are here it is each had to provide 25 pounds a year to pay instructors high by the captain the sum was reduced to three pence a day so yeah you used had to have like a guarantor to work in the navy dicks however had other ideas each quarter he'd solemnly hand uh to each of us a small bag of rupees representing our uh accumulated three

pennies he never thought he earned it but his instruction and practical navigation was excellent and lasting so he's a good guy by the sounds of it yeah the guy's given back so he's kind of working pro bono to an extent i imagine he gets paid from his actual sort of role in an official capacity yeah and then this is a sort of um an extra little bit of spending cash on top which is happy to give away good guy um so he spends about a year serving on the fox here traveling up and down the east coast of africa because the british only have small gunboats and river boats so they're covering a lot of territory which he describes as it as being uh all intensely interesting to a boy of 15 and here and there where there were british residents and links

i managed to put in quite a lot of golf so he's he's enjoying his time sort of sailing up and down africa golfing and learning to sail ah classic officer yeah sounds like a pretty decent like chunk this bit at least although he does have some health issues ah uh began losing weight rapidly um and he didn't have much to lose to begin with it was always pretty skinny um he thinks it's probably because of the heat and unsuitable food the staff surgeon uh happened to have worked for his father as one of his students all right um so he was keeping an eye out on him so the treatment prescribed was one glass of port after lunch and another after dinner what effect this had on my weight i do not recollect but while it lasted my work during the afternoon was not distinguished

by much clear-headedness i would imagine so no guys having a little evening tipple that's a fun time in medicine when doctors were like drink more alcohol have some cocaine like that's actually something i'm not sure because i've heard rumors of you know cases where people who suffer with like substance abuse like alcoholism are prescribed a certain amount of alcohol i don't know if that is actually the case or if that is just when you come off it you have to because alcohol i think is the only substance where if you're really addicted and you stop it, you'll

die. Oh wow, so it does actually have that hard of an effect. Delirium tremors, you know, they're like shakes. Oh yes, yeah. Yeah, they get much worse. Whereas like, I think coming off other stuff you can't die, but it's like your body's fucked and whereas this, coming off alcohol

can actually just kill you if you're cold turkey. Yeah, like the physical and chemical symptoms will kill you. Oh wow, so maybe there is some truth to that then. Yeah. But the, uh, this is also, there's a part in here where he describes it's the day before wireless or remote communication other than like telegrams and stuff at fixed cities. So he describes, he describes the ship as subject to rather elastic program. Our captain had more or less a roving commission and was monarch of all he, uh, surveyed.

which is just don't really think of the like you send the guys out and then it's like well i hope they don't do something crazy no control over it but uh they spend a lot of time well not a lot of time but they practice firing torpedoes and firing the guns but it seems pretty laxed and more of a fun thing there's not a lot of uh worry about where the shells are actually landing just popping them off into the middle of nowhere yeah well later on we'll get to it but he accidentally shoots a town that's a big thing to do that's a massive mistake yeah so yeah great year overall and he's pretty gutted when he finds out the fox is going back and he's staying on the doris now instead of going

back with it uh louis does get a promotion to the role of cutter um which is running a like small patrol boat that like accompanies the main one and prof rose back here being a bit of a taskmaster he wants them out in every kind of weather to like get good uh sailing in rough conditions and stuff so there's multiple times when like the cutter their small boat just washes up onto a beach and a crew of midshipmen have to just wait for a storm to end and like to get back but this is when the war with the boers is looking increasingly likely it's like all they talk about amongst the ship and they start doing long marches for infantry training as well and they dye their nice white navy uniforms uh with coffee so they'll be less distinguishable snipers which

makes sense just walking around in a war with a bright white suit on well i've done that on the way to work a few times when i've got a coffee from greg's or somewhere else and i've spilled coffee on myself so that explains why i've never been under sniper fire on the way to work active camo yeah always great in a an urban environment so and the war does start october 12th 1899 two other ships come to join them the terrible from portsmouth and its sister ship the powerful returning from china they put together a naval brigade of about 350 consisting mostly of marines 290 of them two small field guns and then those are manned by sailors and then later there's a further detachment of 400 who are mostly marines sent but they are sending midshipmen and like

senior naval officers into this land conflict all right okay so the really mixed bag yeah and part of the reason for this is they don't have the artillery they need so at this time as well they're also experimenting taking the guns off the ships and trying to mount them so they can use them on land. Yeah, so they don't have the means to do it. No, they're sort of MacGyver. It's sort of a bit not on to say the British Empire was MacGyvering against the Boers,

but these specific guys were. Yeah, that really downplays the massive artillery imbalance in this conflict. And you are taking the gun off a ship. Yeah, you've already got the big advantage of having the ship. ABC wants to go, but he gets left behind. He just doesn't get assigned to it. And he suspects here this is, again, a bit of his father's sort of legacy or shadow here.

That's people not sending him to the front because his father's well-known and well-respected. And, like, a lot of ship's doctors and that sort of stuff. know his father so there's a bit of like keeping him safe there yeah yeah which he describes to his mother in a letter i'm fearfully sick at present uh at not getting up to the front it is enough to make a saint swear to see these people about a year junior to you and only about two months on the station go up and you sitting down here doing absolutely nothing so he does want to get to the front uh but he feels doomed to staying on the doris uh and he's just very unhappy here until february where he gets a lucky outside lucky for him uh captain proffer is back on the ship after

a spell in hospital um and the new marine major has arrived because the last one has died in action um as these things often happen yeah so he takes the chance here to try and request uh going to the front so this is him uh how he describes approaching the captain to ask permission i was terrified and shaking uh but made a noise and woke him he glared a bit and looked very fierce but i managed to stammer out my response all he said was want to go to the front do you boy yes please sir wait outside while i write a note he growled and i retired he always regarded this conversation uh as the bravest deed of his life and that's including what happens in the future as well uh yes it seems this proffero is a very intimidating man well he's a very well

known detective yes and he's played by gilderoy lockhart from harry potter and the chamber of secrets it's quite the legacy in the future yes he's become uh quite uh proficient with the memory charm i believe yeah i'm just yeah glancing over that one okay so yes he's off to war uh at the age of 16 that's not when you want to go to war no and he again also he was jealous of people go a year who because they were a year younger than him so like a lot of this is 15 year olds like but yeah he does he heads north on a train joining up with the naval brigade who serving with lord roberts uh who happens to be a friend of his father's uh he recollects uh spending a lot of time with lord roberts at the zoo

ah it's my dad's friend from the zoo yeah so the marching here is like 2 a.m to 9 a.m and then 3 p.m till 10 p.m to avoid the heat and also just a lot of marching um 14 hours a day i yeah i cannot imagine that's a particularly pleasant experience especially in that part of the world no which he's not enjoying the walk so at one point uh someone catches a horse which he could ride for a couple of days there is one issue however i'm sure it's nothing to do with the horse it is the horse is blind so must be started 90 degrees from the direction you want to go the horse has got drag on like the same way a controller does on like one of the thumbsticks and it's just like right everyone we're going like a collarball facing the same

direction and a guy on a horse perpendicular and then like turning to go alongside them he describes this in a letter to his father he goes i can't uh ride but i can't stick on which is just as good so he's this is his first rodeo yeah they're also having some fun on the horse uh in between the horrific marching and the war so in the same letter i mentioned that i had been out on a wood chopping party with mr ernest low uh a gunner he and i tried wrestling on horseback and pushing each other off on opposite sides he came down on his head but i came down in the sitting position lo for a service in south africa was one of the first four officers to be awarded the now distinguished service cross but they've still not had any fighting at this point and it's

pretty dull at one point roberts comes over from the army to the naval brigade and gives some sort of like rousing speeches and does a uh inspection uh and then to abc's horror uh requests him by name yeah you don't want the teacher to call you out in front of the class no ask you to stay behind the the extreme version this is the general yeah this is far worse um but yeah because they knew each other he just was sort of surprised to see him there was like hey kind of like what are you doing here oh that's even worse when the teacher knows your family and they're like stay back afterwards and everyone's like oh teacher's fair you know the teacher i had that in school a few times yeah well i felt i had one of them in our school a few years older than us but you hear

when a kid's in the same school that their parent teaches up oh yeah that must be a real drag yeah i've worked with a family member before and it's so odd because as well as that it was a parent and i had to call them by actual name oh it felt so alien yeah so the army are heading off here again um leaving behind two guns uh as a defensive position for the time they're on abc's pissed when he's one of the midshipmen assigned to the guns he describes it as dull uh but he's happy when he does get um eventually lord robert comes back into the denatival camp and asks to see him and surprised when he's not there and orders to see him so he thinks of his relationship i do not think my acquaintance with lord roberts did me much good in the end as afterwards i had good

reason to appreciate that i was highly unpopular with the captain probably because he thought i'd used my influence to circumvent his wishes uh which makes sense i get that i get that so he has to catch up with the naval brigade again so he's jumping on the trains uh joins up with a group of marines who are waiting for ammo and they set off again the final day before he catches up with them he can hear the naval guns uh he hears that they're only six o'clock six miles ahead so at eight o'clock he's cooked he started a fire on a train station and is frying bacon nice bit of light arson to make your food at the train station yep and who rides in but the paymaster who said the guns had started moving at seven and we're going 19 miles which means he has a 25 mile march

that day which is a marathon he's got some bacon in him though oh yeah fortunately he runs into two soldiers who have also acquired a pony and they set off in a cart together until the pony sort of flounders and then they let it go and do the rest of it on foot and he's assigned again to artillery guns just in time for the battle of pretoria on june 4th which kicks off at 6 30 am here's some snippets from a letter he wrote about that then as the bullets began to fly from boa snipers we moved back a bit where we stayed for about half an hour and all the time the bullets were coming over our heads but the worst was yet to come hearing that party of boa snipers in a copage on the right were making it pretty hard for the four sevens we moved forward to another

position to shell them out and did so suddenly there came a whir and a scream then a bang a boa shell burst amongst four horses and broke one's leg then the fun began we were on the skyline and they were weighing in and shelling us with three or four guns the RA had come up to our right but they could not stand it so they were limbered up away we stuck there and fired away while one shell bursting in front of the gun and i moved to another one burst in front of the other throwing dust all over us so pretty uh pretty intense experience they're pretty close to dying yeah he nearly got blown up i mean poor horse got injured but then looking back on this when he was writing the autobiography he says that that was potentially the pardonable exuberance of a

16 year old midshipman under fire for the first time looking back on it i doubt if the boas were putting up any real serious resistance there was plenty of rifle fire and bullets flicking about but nothing really much in the way of shelling so potentially those like letters are him either it's the first time he's under fire so it's all bigger and or he's exaggerating up to start bearing the letters home but i have you seem fairly humble so far yeah it seems more like i'm guessing because he's later on he's in like massive naval things with like dozens of battleships and like air carriers it's like this is actually very small scale yeah relative to the stuff he's going to be getting involved in later yes yeah it changes his perspective massively

the naval brigade has had a really rough time uh they're all dirty all their clothes are tattered uh most of them have got dysentery all that remains of this period are 14 officers 100 sailors and 70 marines all manning artillery at this point so they've lost about 600 of their contingent that's a big difference bad losses so they reach uh belfast uh on august 25th uh held by the boas and over the following two days have a battle that goes by that name. He wrote to his mother on the 31st, We were wakened by the Boer shells bursting around.

We shelled them all day with few intervals and they shelled us and also sniped us. No one was hit and we were given credit for silencing two guns. So at this point, Lord Roberts gives them an order, hey, head back to Pretoria. It turns out his father's been appointed to a royal commission of medicine for south africa here and has come to do a inspection and like set up medical arrangements so he's leaving the naval brigade again back on the

trains and there's an interesting bit here i thought where coz's family's on a medical thing and he's actively serving there's like some pretty serious high-level discussions about is it breaking the geneva convention for you to be on the train with your parents that's a very extreme case of red tape yes uh you don't want to mess that one up no it does settle in his favor uh eventually so he's uh is allowed to stay with them and he has a relatively comfortable week at this point traveling around on the train um before he starts to head back and rejoins the naval brigade who are ordered back to their ships in september after seven months of war and a lot of hard marching and a bit of fighting in between but just marching

themselves to death basically he's 17 so his birthday's happened at this point hey happy birthday abc they did get accommodated well uh a small contingent uh over the period of nine months no one was brought before a commanding officer for any crime neglect of juki slackness and they're just gonna get the train back to the doris here uh but there's one last sort of bit of excitement before they do uh the train they're on fails to break uh and like hills downhill towards another station which has a train in it i thought you're gonna say a fire cooking bacon no um they all have to jump clear of the train and two who don't manage it die which is like really a kick in the face surviving that conflict and then dying in a train accident yeah that's very narnia yeah so he

gets back to the doris uh and found that much of my own gear that i had set down at the front had been prolonged including greatly to my annoyance 20 of the solid gold discs which kruger had struck when he ran out of regular coinage given the option of staying on the station or going home i chose the latter and a few days a few days later in the middle of october sailed from cape town in the transport uh lake erie uh so he's still in the navy but he's leaving south africa heading back to england for a new assignment i'm sure an assignment that will bear much fruit towards his future career yeah so he said he didn't regret it even though it seemed like a pretty rough time with some sort of hijinks with horses in between classic meat face yeah he thought of it as a grand

experience for a boy of 17 to have lived in considerable discomfort and to have had to fend for his men and himself you know all sorts of unfamiliar conditions inseparable from active service ashore in a strange country it taught one uh responsibility and self-reliance living so to speak on one's wits and doing make do with improvisation it also brought him in close contact with the army which would be very useful in years to come and above all it caused him to realize the cheerful endurance and the many other sterling qualities of the versatile and adaptable person that is the british sailor so yeah that's uh abc he's 17 and he's fought in the boat wall it sounds low-key traumatic for him yeah sounds like you shrugged it off a little bit

but i imagine a lot of these experiences probably had a long-lasting effect on him the sort of nearly being blown up on his horse oh yeah the train crash the actual battles he partook in you know i feel like there's a lot of stuff there that really does sit with you for a long time and it seems like he's brushed it off fairly blase yeah i mean it obviously existed but ptsd and then shell shock before that sort of became a thing in people when world war one i guess it's because millions of people were coming home from particularly brutal warfare but it seemed that there was a lot of just sort of deal with it i guess well yeah the psychological um i guess infrastructure yeah for assessing that kind of thing did not exist for a while well i

guess also he's brought up from the age of 10 to be a naval officer and a warrior and like in that culture to like you wonder if like spartans or romans or like particularly martial cultures that like inoculates it must get some of it to a certain extent yeah maybe not in a particularly healthy way but maybe you sort of become numb to it it's sort of it's sort of the keep calm carry on while the bombs drop it's like you do your thing regardless of what's happening around you quite extreme sort of preemptive exposure therapy yeah where you've already been around this kind of environment so maybe when you're actually in it actively it's not as jarring you become sort of desensitized to it or outside of it afterwards yes it it makes sense in the worldview

you've been given yeah so then like random violence like if you're not familiar with it It's a very strange way to contextualize the world. Yeah. One that I'm glad I don't have. I do not envy that at all. Well, that's history for you. It is. That's the second run round, and we got it.

And it was as interesting the second time round. Oh, good. So we didn't lose anything on my end. And for everyone listening, this is your first time round, your first bite at the cherry. Maybe a little more refined. Yeah, maybe so. I enjoyed it.

It was always good. I love Poirot. Gal Gadot had a cameo appearance. Yeah. So everyone had a great time. All was well, especially for ABC. Oh, yeah. He made it through.

He had some bacon on the train station. Well, that covers off history. We did forget, actually, last time to mention this. So this is a good job, if anything. Because what we do have still until the end of this month is the merch store, which is still going. Yeah, it'll be up for another week after this comes out. Yeah, so we've got a merch store.

a lot of you guys have been asking us to pop some stuff out we have it's still there for the end of the month it's on um it'll be on the episode description it will be on the it's a link on the instagram uh not on the website i believe we haven't quite figured that out it's just a few bits and pieces some hats well it's sort of a trial store so we weren't gonna link it fully up yeah if you're outside of the u.s postage will potentially be a bit steep yeah the shipping is something we haven't been able to figure out just yet we do have a solution which will roll out for a permanent store in the future uh bear with us on when that'll be so if you do want to grab something the shipping is pretty high at the moment internationally outside of the us um that's

just where this stuff is made so yeah if you want to grab something have a look and um if you want to hang on until later then you can and thanks again everyone who has ordered i believe all of the orders that have been made so far have been delivered hope it's nice stuff hope you enjoy it hope you're wearing it or drinking from it with pride um but yeah we'll we'll get you an update when that's rolled out permanently uh additionally we did not mention how to get in touch with us if you want to send us some mail oh that's good i completely messed it up because we just bombed through last time um so for anyone who wants to send some mail the email address is info at warwithamate.co.uk we have an instagram page which is just war with a mate we post a weekly update

for the episodes and there's also our website warwithamate.co.uk there's a web form on there if you want to send something over that way anything it is i mean you'll you'll know by this point we get some weird and wonderful emails some great questions some odd anecdotes some field trips anything that you would like to send over we'll be happy to read it out we'll be happy to read it ourselves anything you want to send we don't really have much of a restriction on that i guess just have fire it over hate mail would be i guess less than ideal but we haven't had any yet so i don't know if you want to send our first bit of hate mail go for it don't do that don't do that if someone's listened all the way through to this this is a long episode if someone's listened all

the way to this point they've decided to send hate mail more power to them you know who i want said hey mail to andy is this something we could agree on well you see we had a common ground that we went over yesterday when we started recording this and when we did it the first time around and we we reached a consensus very quickly so this is a bit of a unique common ground because this is meant to be a time for us to come together and we did just that yesterday it was great i loved it and i was going to bring this back up and we were going to come with a united front it was going to be such a magical common ground where to make up for this instance of a blip where we had to re-record the following day we were going to come in really strong we were

going to have a united front with backed up information research to really go ham on this topic and when i sat down here you told me you've changed your fucking mind yeah what the hell is that so tell them what it is and i'll tell you my take yesterday what did i say yesterday i want to outlaw anyone who is currently employed as or runs a business which carries out the cleaning of wheelie bins ah yes that was it bin cleaners cleaning a wheelie bin is such a bizarre concept and we went over this yesterday we'll rehash it now because no one else was here we don't know how commonplace this is anywhere else in the world but for your wheelie bin in the uk your wheelie bin you put your you know your household refuge into it trash yeah you put

your your trash your rubbish your crap you put it into your wheelie bin either the general waste one or the recycling one and they get picked up by the council on alternating weeks one week it's the general waste one it's the recycling and somehow some people have made a living on the back of cleaning these bins and these are private companies these are individuals these are let's face it uh rapscallions people who are making uh you know i say an honest living on cleaning it it's like a 30 second job to quickly spray some water and i imagine some nice smelling fragrances and a task we are completely agreed on pointless to clean a bin that's outside it's a bin for your rubbish it's meant to fucking smell and it's that's the idea of it it's meant to stink and

i had a conversation with someone not too long ago who does get their wheelie bin cleaned three pounds 50 for a clean three pounds 50 for a 30 second job you see i was thinking about that and this is where my disagreement comes in right so what how do you disagree with this being a bad idea i went because you won't fuck the bin cleaners more or less yeah i i've come around to it i've got a bit of respect for that hustle the people paying for it are complete fucking morons but the guys actually like getting paid to do it to a certain extent fair play if you can trick a bunch of people into thinking that bins need to be cleaned and they have to pay you to do it every week that's the crazy good on you this is a weekly thing every single week they are cleaning your

general waste bin and also the recycling bin why is your recycling bin dirty because it's meant for it's meant for degradables it's it's meant for you know cardboard it's stuff that shouldn't be filthy or smelly if it is it probably can't be recycled that's my understanding you've messed up yeah you're putting the wrong thing into your recycling bin so i guess first of all you're neglecting your bin already if you need your recycling bin clean something's gone wrong it's the bin equivalent of not looking after your dog at all but taking him to the vet once a month like that'll handle all the neglect i'm doing yeah i'm not feeding the dog properly yeah i'm not taking him out for walks but i'll take him to the vet and the vet will just fix this

no you're doing it wrong and if you need your general waste bin cleaned then do it yourself it's free yes it may take a bit longer you probably don't have whatever special apparatus and you can't see the air quotes i'm doing but i am doing them because realistically this isn't special apparatus it's probably just a glorified hose maybe a pressure washer i think i've come around on it because far enough on the binkley it is because it's if this is a worry in your life your life is comfortable enough that people can take three pounds a week off you i mean i suppose so but that's the dangerous thing what if you're not comfortable then just say i'd probably having a dirty bed but people people fall into this trap because it's part of

the the last dying part of the dynasty of of window cleaners and milkmen you know it's people who used to show up at your front door and provide a service and then it became door-to-door salesmen and people trying to solicit for charity donations which that's not necessarily a bad thing but it's again people showing up at your front door and just wanting money but these people they've tricked everyone they'll they'll trick entire streets i now see people on my facebook feed who are asking actively asking if anyone knows any wheelie bin cleaners how how does he you find out about them and just want that i see that as the kind of stupidity of someone on facebook asking how to get into like nfts in 2025 it's like it's it's all dumb but kind of fair play to the grifter

no not because it's such a low tier thing to get grifted about it's kind of just funny to me now but you shouldn't be encouraging this grift I do like grifters though yeah I know you do you've got a lot of flaws Andy and this is one of them everyone loves grifters when they're not getting grifted I don't especially this kind of grift rather than like you know

divisive political grifting if you're just like scamming people on a low level like the real hustle that's such a good program they would do that on the real hustle and I think any crime those guys would commit

maybe shouldn't even be a crime well that program was all about trying to steal luggage for the most part i'll make people ring premium premium phone lines oh i love how many episodes of that program was just them stealing someone's phone in a cafe then it's just a different location where they go the the con is like yeah as you say 50 of the time you go oh hey my phone's out of battery do you mind if i just like ring my uh partner or whoever they're expecting me just to arrange transport and then you just get on you call a premium right phone number and you just stand in front of them having as long a fake conversation as possible while a bank account trades it was either that or they would take the phone they would change the contact name

from someone on their phone like they would change like you know their their mother or their partner or something and they would just change the number to a premium phone number like a phone rate and then they would they would send a text message from that number and be like oh i need you to call me or i need you to text me or whatever and then just rack up these massive costs on a phone bill and then the other 50 of these cons were a two-man job because one person would talk to someone and distract them while someone else ran up behind them and stole their luggage in like high vase or dressed as a waiter and it would always be like a very like intricate plan where it's like five or six steps to steal like 50 quid's worth of stuff

it's like luggage with like you know maybe you get you strike gold and there's a laptop in there or something but for the most part it's probably just fucking clothes and stuff yeah maybe a maybe a phone charger and a power bank but realistically you're just grabbing someone's clothes it's not a good scam and neither is this three pound fifty a pop yes i know it's a quick job but there must be a sense of of shame surely been really been cleaners as a profession should be outlawed was my common ground and i don't surely you still stand on that same point it should be outlawed i've no if not if not for the fact that i think it's a deplorable scheme but you just pointed out there for the well-being of the victims of this it's good it's not good it's a level of like

because no one no one is like struggling is going to be like yes keep cleaning my bin it's kind of just like a thing to skim a little off the comfort you shouldn't care about how dirty your bin is

yes correct and I think if you do you should be punished for it okay you know what I kind of agree with that I think that is basically what I've been getting to you know what I guess yeah build a rod for their own back here what they've done is they've decided

that this is something that they need, you've now locked yourself into this, this is your own mechanism of personal torture you're a masochist you know right, I suppose we're right, so we're doing that with the game in a way

so we've decided yeah, I guess we also can't be like your life's too comfortable you should pay to clean your bin anyway i'm gonna spend hundreds of pounds and thousands of hours playing a board game yeah i guess kids in glass houses um all right so yeah i guess at the risk of sort of exposing ourselves as being the same kind of person maybe we maybe we just let that one sit there maybe we just kind of shuffle that under if you want to pay for your bin to be cleaned

i think it's a very very bad idea and i'd like to know about it yes if anyone meets no no not from the fans oh yes yes in my personal life if someone pays to get their bin cleaned i'd like them to let me know so i can like message them once a week and be like hey can i borrow a fiver and if anyone does get their bin cleaned he's listening let us know why i want to know the actual rationale behind this and if it's just we're gonna be we're gonna get emails and it's like yes this is why is your bin filthy it's like we've missed a very obvious thing and we're just slobs you know what i know that bin you know yeah i get wanting things to be clean but this goes outside and it's constantly full of rubbish so it should be dirty that's what that's what it's

designed to do and for those who are wondering if you want a replacement wheelie bin from the council it's around 30 pounds so if you're paying 3.50 a week just wait 10 weeks and buy a new wheelie bin just get rid of the old one yes it's very environmentally damaging um i guess i can't really do anything about that point but if you want to do that there is an option i suppose it's going to be a huge spike in the amount of wheelie bin replacement claims coming through the council just killed one industry and propped up another well you know what it's more money for the local council and a wheelie bin definitely doesn't cost 30 pounds so hopefully that just means it's an influx into the local area and it means that we can restore the parks we can fill

the potholes and we can help local communities so if anything this is a moment of political activism and we're making a real change here so if you want to help your local area buy bins yeah don't pay the wheelie bin cleaner get a replacement bin help the local community that is the common ground that can be some common ground think local well on that local note I think we bid a farewell

we may have released this one a little bit late however this is a nice bumper sized episode you've really got some bang for your buck hopefully we've made up for it and if not I'm very sorry we can't do anything about that now we can't go back in time we can only go forward and with that

I'm James I'm Andy it's been listening to war mate stay subtle humble and brave and in the deserts of your minds watch out for that bacon cooking on some train stations and do not get your wheelie bin cleaned farewell stop wasting your nights on a mattress that doesn't get you experience the most comfortable mattress in the world the sleep number smart bed at the touch of a button you can personalize your comfort choose firmer or softer adjust cooler to warmer and right now save up to twenty five

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