War With A Mate - Episode 53: I Want To Believe

Episode Date: December 5, 2025

Ahh, that crisp, December air is here once more. A Truck Day that becomes so much more sees the movement of supplies on the ground and pilots in the air, in what could be the most important Air Mission section to date. Whether the tide of war will turn for either Andy or James is just one of many questions raised today. How do you contact Santa? Are the game rules truly accurate? What deserves to last forever?

hello and welcome to the elephant that's right handy we've rebranded you can't do shit about it i can't you can't have control of all the stuff no this is this is the elephant the podcast as intended in its raw beautiful form it's the podcast in which me james me andy play the campaign for north africa a very long game and we used to call this something completely different didn't we andy yeah war with a mate yeah oh it's actual don't say those words why would you try and bring that back because i thought i could i thought it's been long enough i thought it's been it's been over a year now i can probably slip that in you wouldn't notice I guess me mentioning the rebrand probably

fucked that plan from go also it'll be a bad idea whenever it's mentioned regardless of time right I suppose so it's bad for SEO it's bad for brand recognition it's bad for a few reasons well we're sticking with war with a mate then really

I think we're sort of pot committed now oh for god's sake okay okay fine it's war with a mate it's a podcast where we do the thing I just said boy that's deflated you you've really taken the wind out of my sails there man well it's still the same thing it's still war with a mate with the campaign for north africa as the guest um how was the guest today would you say andy pretty good wasn't didn't get a huge amount done but well you say that today was

truck day it was we'd start out doing a bit of trucking and there was a time where truck day would be solely truck day but we've sped it up we have and today we did truck day for upstage one of turn three and then we got into upstage two of turn three where we did we rolled the weather we determined initiative we did an air combat and we assigned all of our air missions yes and we did some organization beforehand yeah so that's not a small amount i would say actually do a fairly decent amount yeah and part of that delay was because we did a big rules clarification which hasn't come up in a while yes we did have a big old rules check and it was on an area which we have seldom touched on i think we've only ever touched that area once but we'll get to that

indeed so starting from the start it was truck day and it was as always a beautiful day truck day always now is a grand day the sun is shining the birds are singing because i've figured out what to do with trucks so for me it's always good how did you find your truck stuff andy incredibly simple my supply line is a line yeah you you have a you have a one-dimensional truck system yeah mine is not too far off nowadays it's no longer the scattered mess of four or five trucks at a time that it once was through amalgamation of trucks or you hijacking them and running them west into the wilds it's become a much simpler matter so i moved my trucks around i've done a bit of dancing between bardia and what i call supply dump one which is the one that garrisons

the wall as i've taken to calling them the group that have moved across map c into map d so that was just a couple moves back and forth you did give me the harsh reality check that it's been a rainstorm so I had to remember that and instead of it being two trips for each convoy it was just the one and it led to breakdown of just a couple trucks just one actually one single truck that's fine which I'll take they're also not too far from Tobruk they can get there they can get repaired that's fine bolstered that a little bit and I also moved my big convoy from Bardia down to the big supply dump that was a point of contention last week the one near fort maddalena the one that used to belong to you yes now that one as you may remember everyone is the one where i thought

it was going to be my my saving grace my hail mary not mary maddalena mind you just mary um don't believe she had a surname um it wasn't called manteley just mary mary bible i believe it was um and i've i've started filling that back up the reason behind that as you know damn well andy is because my supply dump one up along the north coast is subject to bombing from your convoy your your naval convoy yes it's right on the water and i don't like the the beautiful mediterranean view would be a great place to be if it wasn't you know a war yeah maybe so but unfortunately everyone who sat at that supply dump waiting for the troops to arrive and replenish themselves unfortunately what they'll find is a big array of naval vessels ready to blow them to

the next life yeah i think there's like seven ships like a bunch of destroyers on a battleship well i wasn't too keen on what happened there so i uh yeah i decided i'm gonna start filling up that other supply dump which was intended to be my saving grace got some trucks down there a few breakdowns there three trucks down there were 28 medium trucks i lost three all the heavies are still there so i'll take that that's not too bad a loss apart from that the only other truck movement i did was the northern coastline which was filling up the airstrips again airstrips and airfield for my bombers that went well not a single breakdown i'll take that even with the rainy conditions there's no no real damage done i would say to that convoy so all is going well

on the truck front i nearly nearly broke off some of my trucks from the black shirts to dart off and head over as a big wave of trucks we're talking like 100 trucks i decided no james you're not going to do that what you are going to do is be a sensible man i was a sensible man i kept them as first line trucks garrisoning these huge swathes of black shirts who may or may not show up and if they do it will be towards the end of the scenario for one last hurrah andy how did your trucks go very smooth uh one went from alexandria mers-matruh one went from mers-matruh alexandria yep that's it fantastic so moving on and one did some very local supplies i guess to wrap up that turn we did some we've got some breakdown to do i've got my guys that

are moving slowly but surely up towards to brook a few more repairs to be done i'll see how that pans out hopefully well maybe not but i'm i'm optimistic i got some tanks last time i'm interested to see where they go in this land movement phase because they're replacement points at the minute aren't they they are they are so you need to shouldn't you move them in the trucks phase i couldn't do anything with them because they were ah ah no i could have because it was last repair phase that they were repaired yeah you make a good point andy could move them now oh well call me out like that son of a bitch yeah i do need to move those tanks to where they should be you know what i'm glad that i didn't move them when it's rainy

that's bad for the tanks because there's no such thing as roads during the rain and tanks, boy do they love breaking down, they do, they're actually hooked on it, hooked on a feeling I'm high on believing

that's going to peak horribly I'm looking at the audiograph now yes, that's going to take a little bit of tweaking behind the scenes oh no, that's bad, that can't be fixed, but that's okay that's fine but you know why andy it's december yeah it's the festive season it's crept up on us it has just like that we're back at christmas you know what you're getting

for christmas do you know what i'm getting what son is bringing you what's he bringing yeah i'm asking if you no i don't know put a list up the chimney i thought you had an in with the big man what put a list up the chimney did you just say yeah like at the start of december you leave the list next to the fireplace he does a little reconter comes down gets your list and then comes back a few weeks later with your stuff that's demented are you trying to cause a house fire no you don't burn it you leave it just next to the fireplace and he just swings down and gets it maybe he sends an elf you're leaving loose dry parchment near a fireplace yeah not in the fireplace nearby where i can catch an ember and then erupt into flame it's not on what's not on

you're right you know what no this is not on you're right this is absolutely not on that's How did you get your listers on it? I write it down, I give it to my parents. Not anymore, but I would give it to my parents. See, my parents didn't have a direct line, so I had to leave it next to the fireplace. Well, could they not then find another safer way to hand it off to Santa?

Who comes and get this in your fucked-up fire hazard world? I assume Santa, but, I mean, he's probably busy prepping, so maybe an elf. Sorry, you think the big man himself is going to show up in December, which is the year's christmas eve yeah he's doing like a practice route what practice route goes to every house and gets the list right that's bad that's so inefficient it's unbelievable that you know what that explains why why some boys and girls don't get christmas presents that they ask for if that's what he's doing that explains so much and people say it's all about

you know poverty and it's about families not being able to spend lavishly at christmas and everyone has to just live within their means and buy someone something that's meaningful and it's all about the thought but realistically we could all be getting xboxes we could all be getting cool stuff we could all be getting a bike but this kind of mentality that you've got andy it's absolutely butchering some kids i think it's because when i was like five maybe maybe four i did my christmas list but i was like santa will know what i want and wouldn't give it to my parents so they have to come up with a lie to get it that is that is one of my favorite metas kids figuring out that small line between make believe and truth where they start to believe

too much in the fantasy and the parents lose control of the fantasy it's a bit like the tooth fairy thing of like you put the tooth under your pillow but you you stay awake all night giddy waiting for the tooth fairy to show up and you don't get you can't get your money anymore how much did you get from the tooth fairy i think it was a pound yeah i think mine was a pound i think i got a 50 pence one but i also did another one i lost a two foot like one of my baby teeth at school i like got knocked and it got knocked out and i didn't tell my parents i snuck it under of my pillow and weirdly the two fairies shouldn't show up that time so i'm i like testing supernatural beings yeah you've got a bit of a function for that i think you genuinely do like to to poke

and prod at the border of the supernatural just to test what's going on you've got a very x-files vibe about you i'll give you that i do want to believe you want to believe so hard so endearing you are the perfect child to have at christmas but unfortunately now andy you're a man and as a man you've decided to invest all of your your attention and your uh fantasy belief into this being a good idea to do and it's almost working almost but yeah we finished finished up stage one of turn three we did and then we barreled straight through into upstage two yep so i mean first off we had a distribution and stuff uh did you do any reorganizing i didn't i nearly did like i say with the black shirts nearly chunked off some of the trucks i was having a look at how

much stores i've got within those trucks and whether or not i can get them to the front line to an extent that i wouldn't need a new resupply of stocks of stores i decided it's not worth the risk i don't know what's going to happen another foul weather could completely upset that yeah so i decided against it they're all staying as frontline trucks first line oh nice i did a little bit of organization i split the sixth australian up hadn't got the things out but they're now in like the three smaller chunks i'm gonna split it and also motorize the seventh because they had enough empty trucks to chuck the boys in ah the boys are in the trucks now yeah so is that fully motorized seventh division oh yeah right i'll need to keep an eye on that

thankfully it won't be too much of an issue because following that we went on to air before air did we have some boats oh yeah i don't want to talk about a lot of stuff to do before that but yeah i don't want to talk about the boats so i've sent a detachment of cruisers up to your little wall they're ready to start shelling and sent a bigger detachment of more not as good ships to go and bomb that supply dump we've been talking about yep supply dump one is gonna be destroyed no supply dump one is going to be fine right i've just filled it with supplies today so that means it's going to be okay oh you filled it with supplies so what you don't know andy is i've stacked a bunch of boxes full of like lead and other heavy materials in front between the

supplies and the coastline now you probably haven't seen these rules they're buried deep in but i'm allowed to do that and you can't do anything about it you're actually and i checked this you're not even allowed to read that part of the rules which sounds shocking i know but richard berg was a genius and you aren't really allowed to question that otherwise you're questioning the integrity of the game which would be wild exactly so i know it's bad news i'm sorry to break it to you now on live mike but there's always next time i think the amount of guns they'll just chew through your little defenses i fear that even in this fantasy world you may be right i do fear that yeah that's happening uh but then yeah we moved there we did we went up in the

a bunch of missions each i had 690 bombs to drop that's a lot and to guard them i had zero fighters which was news to me but i'm happy about well it shouldn't be news to you andy because you spent the last year of your life aggressively hunting planes yes undercutting my air superiority and you've managed to succeed it would seem to an extent because you've now pulled the rug out from under me i don't have fighters that can fly because the it's it's one of a few things the supply line is either fucked which is kind of through my own doing i'll take responsibility and hold my hand up for that or it's because you've destroyed the airfield or it's because you've popped into the airfield quickly and killed all of the people who worked there

which is again a war crime no yeah they weren't armed they have pistols i assume they surrendered immediately they they just fall back ineffectually you don't know you don't know my men i know my men also the only people who walked out of those airfields are my guys and they're not telling themselves wow you're really painting the commonwealth as the bad guys here andy no that's not quite tip the balance okay fair enough i'm not gonna try they're basically do what the sas did which i guess they are currently on trial for long rounds yeah let's let's not delve into yeah let's not look too closely at that one so all in all my air force was heavy on the bomber front you had a bit of a mixture i flew two close air patrols combat air

patrols one above the seventh and one above the fourth indian division and the seventh are still sort of out on their own they've just continued almost completely due east yeah from fort madeleine and the secret supply dump that you had and they are now out in the middle of nowhere and i decided to bomb them yes i not only decided to bomb them but i decided to bomb the fourth indian the 16th the guys hanging around the 16th the second new zealand and whoever it was that was Mersa Matruh. That's going to be an interesting one because Mersa Matruh has a lot of anti-aircraft. Yes. And if

I need to check, because it does have a fortification level, I think, which might affect. Yeah, all in all I went for six bombing runs. It's a big spread. It is. I tried to even it out so it's an average of 121 bombs per bombing run. And I had a look over as we were

doing it. Some of them swing a little bit further over, some of them swing a little bit further behind. Oh, so there were a few of them in that column before the 80 to a couple of them are yeah i try to average it out but i realized that the squads do not allow for that so the way i've actually distributed them in my head it was like well it evens at one two one but that doesn't translate to exactly one two one for each one so they're all around that one two one in terms of quantity of bombs would guarantee pinning at least one to a point of any given group yeah and we resolved the one over the seventh we did and

You had a close air patrol, combat air patrol. Yeah, I took out four of your bombers. You took out four planes. You took out three of my bad ones, and you took out one of my good ones. Off the top of my head, I want to say C-309s. Tell you what, I'm going to tell you, because I've got the paper right here.

You took out three of my CA-309s, and you took out one of my BA-65s. People who are listening and are well informed of the Italian Air Force and World War II's North African campaign probably know a lot more about that than I do. I just go off the numbers on the page. But that was a decent hit. And then on the back of that,

we also then calculated the flak, the anti-air. Yes, that was our rule-checking chunk because we've not done... We've not done that before. We've done a couple where the screening fighters have just removed it, I think primarily on when I attacked your naval convoy. Yes, we've done one anti-air before, and I think it was me against you,

and it was very early days. Yeah, I think it was. It would have been the start of turn two when I found that convoy. Oh, I think it might have been. And bombed it. That sounds right. I think it was. but i'd put enough on to just screen them off so we didn't roll it because every three fighters

you put you reduce the anti-air by one i'm almost certain i've done anti-air and aborted one of your planes i just don't know when oh i think you're right actually when would that yeah that would have been a while ago though which might even be turn one yeah it's been a long time since we did it but uh the seventh have quite a bit of anti-air fortunately uh on their not dedicated anti-air um a lot of their tanks have an anti-air rating of one yeah i think it worked out 26 points you had so you aborted another i destroyed two aborted one yes and the way that panned out was you managed to destroy another i think it was two of my good planes again i have it here i've actually got my notes to hand are they you destroyed yes two of my good planes so you destroyed two of my

um or the ca no the ba65s you destroyed two ba65s and aborted another ca309 so all in all you took it down to just below the threshold needed for one of the columns well so you brought it down Fifteen planes and I took out seven overall. Yes. And you took it down to 80 bombs. Which I guess means most of the survivors were your good planes? Yeah. Most of my bombers were good.

I had nine good bombers, six bad ones. So in the end, I had 80 bombs dropped. 81 is the threshold to go into the next column. So that was pretty frustrating. But I can't really do anything about it. Despite being on the lower column, you did get your pin off. I did, I pinned one Yep, you pinned, I'm not going to tell you who

but you pinned one of my infantry guys Yep, I had a choice of three battalions I believe Yep Pinned one, which is good And now I'm teed up, ready to swing at another five groups Yes, and then I've got a bombing run against

the southernmost unit of your little wall at the coast Yes, which I think is I think it's CIR I think I don't know what that is Sir, yes, C-I-R, I can't remember the number, but yes, I know who you mean. 63, I think. C-I-R 63, I think. Yes, I know who you mean.

You've got them teed up for a bombing run, and you're also... I'm continuing to bomb and strafe the Saharans. Yeah, you really want to take them apart, don't you? I just want them to stay still. They probably will. And I don't have any sort of combat air patrol, because I can't. I've got no fighters. also because they've went so far east now i don't even know if my fighters would have been able to

reach them reliably yeah because you lost four magdalena which was you like forward one i don't know where your other fighter base is but i'm guessing just looking at the airfields it's probably on map b it's definitely not on map a i can tell you that yeah well that would be pointless yeah at that point i'm just i've got them ready to fight on map that's a very defensive attitude yeah and it's Graziani's offensive yeah that's misnamed I think it's accurate

maybe historically but not now I don't know if it's accurate historically it was an offensive it was just a short lived and badly timed offensive that they didn't want to do can't remember the exact quote but it was like never

has an army so not wanted to take part in something that's sort of how i function in this i'd love to have not taken part in this but we're a year in you can't really not yeah we have to finish now because of the sunk cost policy this is the practice run yeah anyway but it's the speed is getting much better i'm happier about because today we would have probably got through most of the air stuff but we had well we actually had two big rules discussions we had the anti-air and also how the combat air patrols um yes uh zone of control worked and whether it was everything that came into it or just one

you could do one thing yeah and we've determined that it's the case you can have a combat air patrol which when you have three or more planes have a zone of control and anything that does that zone of control you can distribute your combat air patrol amongst as many missions that you encounter as you see fit to try and counter, but you divide it. You don't attack each one as an individual effort. So

I'm interested to see how the rest of this air combat plays out. Well, it's going to be a very important one for how the this is a very decisive turn for everything, and this is going to affect how this upcoming land combat thing goes.

If you manage to paint a bunch of stuff, it might change well i'll certainly have less guys to use yeah i could potentially pin all of your guys that are up there and then you have to decide what happens in terms of breaking men off which is as good as me having killed an entire battalion yeah it's sort of functional works out the same for you yeah i well better if anything because if i can for the sake of these bombs pin a whole battalion and then you leave them behind they're as good as dead when it comes to a fight yeah

depending on positioning if you choose to leave them behind to come into a fight they're as good as dead if you keep them around and I fight you where they are they can fight another day also they can sort of move in with the other

CPA permitting but just not fight like if they can get to the fight with half their CPA just with them not being included in that cluster for a fight if they manage to get cut off somehow. Becomes very risky for them. Oh, you just

leave them in the overall unit but they can't attack or use more than half their CPA. But if the overall unit uses less than their CPA to get to the enemy they can just be there and they're not like isolated. Do you

not have to detach them if they're pinned? They can't move though, can they? They can move half their CPA, I think. We'll double-check the bombardment thing, because it's slightly different for air stuff, but I'm pretty sure they can still move, just not much, and they can't attack. Yeah, I guess we'll have to double-check that, but either way, it's hamstringed them to an extent. Yeah, yeah, definitely. So we've got quite a bit to resolve.

It's been a big air phase that we didn't get through. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of air-to-air and a lot of bombing to resolve, but all in all, a very exciting situation. Oh, yeah. it's good when the bombing runs matter when it comes to the land stuff yeah we've done a lot of stuff where we do a bombing run and it doesn't really manifest in the air in the land stage whereas this one really will impact the land stage quite significantly oh yeah and that and that was it that was today's play yeah it was quite a quite an interesting one it felt a bit old school with

the rules checking we've not had a big yeah i was thinking that we've not often have to go back and look through the rules in depth I guess also I don't know if we mentioned it we rolled normal weather for this upstage I think we didn't mention it because it doesn't do anything

and you have initiative yes I took initiative which is a given but yes you chose to have initiative and it's normal weather thank god it's normal weather so glad for that I did not want more weird weather shit

I really wanted foul weather you are foul weather I just wanted to take the air stuff out of play basically I mean it would have made this whole session much more we would have just gone immediately to land yeah it would have taken off this

bombing run that I've got going on which would have been great for you but bad for James so this is good for James ergo I like it big fan of it you know what else i'm a big fan of andy getting emails from our fans yes but also oh the way that our fans have jumped in and really been a godsend when it comes to movember oh yes because movember

is over the mustache is gone i will be putting up a post probably this week with the episode one on instagram i'll be showing off the before and after of the mustache and um what what it looks like without the moustache now that it's departed unfortunately it grew on me as moustaches do that's a good moustache joke but we ended up with just over 300 pounds in donations that is fucking brilliant so to everyone that donated or talked about it or shared it thank you so much i know we've hopped on about this a lot it's an important cause and i'm very unapologetic about that but i know that this is about you know the campaign for north africa but i just wanted to give one final shout out and thank you for everyone who contributed to that it's incredible

that we raised money for a good cause so everybody who's been involved with that just remember that this is not just a podcast about a silly board game it's one that also put money into a very good charity so thank you so much for that and that also it comes from interaction with everybody with our listeners andy and these these kooky characters they keep on coming it turns out that there is no shortage of wacky anecdotes or thought-provoking questions because we've got some today in the mailbag and you can start i think andy what have you got over there in that mailbag hewitt hewitt hewitt a uh a repeat emailer i believe hewitt's been in touch before yes so james and andy good afternoon hope this email finds you well i've been a big fan of

the podcast and i really look forward to the new episodes each week i enjoy listening to them while driving exercising study and working on monster spreadsheets of my own at work i have been re-listening to some of the older episodes and between claims of actually starting the game and tangents about bin weevils and michael mcintyre you have convinced me to purchase and try huel which has been one of my favorite jokes throughout the podcast it's not a joke it's not a joke don't try it it's not a joke it's a serious thing that i mean i'm glad you tried it good boy hugh hubert i was already on slip i was pleasantly surprised with the taste and did enjoy it as a protein recovery drink after doing some research about meals eaten by soldiers in the campaign and

throughout world war ii i found that the compo rations used by the british force and the 10-1 rations used by the americans provided 127 grams of protein this really just equals free huel shakes worth of protein perhaps on a second playthrough you can add an amendment to the rules featuring a huel point or it might actually be more catchy the huel rule love it where it acts the same as the pasta point but for the commonwealth instead of boiling pasta it's water for their Huel protein powder. I love it. It's the new remake. It's the modern day

contemporary War With A Maid version of Campaign for North Africa. It's Huel instead of Pasta Point. That is beautiful. Well, you'd still have Pasta Points and then the Commonwealth would have the Huel rule. We'll find another alternative but that's great.

You've already got a re-listen going in, Hewitt. That is dedication to the max that you've went back and started listening to it. the bin weevils on michael mcintyre they're old school they're deep cuts they are deep cuts and for a reason i also thought of some more questions about the game since i emailed previously in march uh you guys mentioned that in the rules it states that uh when you try it across the nile river everyone just dies is that all the rules regarding the river i wouldn't pass the put it

past the game but if so that seems quite intense well for that it's not quite to do with the river but if there's a sandstorm it doesn't affect the delta hexes around the nile yes and also when it's raining you can't cross the nile i believe yes there's something even with roads i think you might be out of luck yeah i think that's probably what we were referencing that when you come across the nile in that weather you just can't cross it at all so i think the the interpretation is you die if you try to cross the Nile which means you just aren't allowed in the terms of the rules to cross

the Nile. I don't think there's a function where you can cross it and die automatically but that's I think the intention behind it that if you were trying to cross it during a rainstorm you would be killed in the treacherous conditions but yeah the game doesn't

allow you to do that but you are right Hugh it's wild that this is a game where you can expect there to be a rule that allows you to voluntarily die in the nile i wouldn't be shocked if it's in there maybe we've missed it it could be in there very possible we've missed it what does it mean to go first i guess we talked about initiative this time and how many actions does the player going first get to do before the other gets to react you go through it in each sort of stage so like organization air but it's kind of different in each one because for instance organization initiative doesn't

matter yes because that's sort of it that's independent from it doesn't interact with one another yeah so organization you're reattaching or detaching trucks you're separating units into smaller units or grouping them up together and attaching them attrition it's the sort of management stuff so there's no reason that that and because nothing yeah nothing you can do during the organization phase can affect your opponent i don't think so i don't think organization phase has any interaction so that's kind of simultaneous and then also weirdly air combat is simultaneous you both plan everything and then declare it to each other so that initiative again doesn't matter that much at that point yeah you sort of you take turns describing you know who's going to go first

what the missions are and you rule the results but one air mission doesn't have a knock-on effect on the other one because they happen simultaneously and whoever's going second doesn't get to see the other person's air missions and then plan accordingly yes exactly what it does matter in is uh matters a lot in the land combat part of the game yes because in that instance you are then actually moving your units before the other person um one thing i guess it does factor in as well as that is the result of air combat you can pin and bombard and that then has a knock-on effect for player b which is the person who does not have initiative yes but you go through but so when you become player a second you get the stuff from that applied to you yes so you go through

both stages i think one of the most important things about initiative we might have mentioned this we might just not come up your cpa which is your ability to do things your capability point allowance that's per upstage in total not per you they don't refresh when the second player starts having initiative yes which means if you're first and like you attack someone that costs them cpa they might retreat that cost them cpa so if you've got initiative you can potentially affect the second player's capabilities quite a lot so initiative is very important for that wedge and then i think i'd go back to saying it's probably not that important for the truck convoy which now i'm breaking it down feels weird because initiative always feels very important but

it just affects one vital chunk of the game it's essentially just land movement is the core part which i think is the biggest part of moving your troops but that that is where it comes into play that is where initiative yeah takes effect it's realistically the only time and the way that andy and i do it as well whoever has initiative whoever chooses to go first rather because having initiative means you get to choose who goes first um it's just the case that whoever whoever goes first also rules the weather yes which has become a point of contention because andy seems to roll the weather that i don't want which i take don't you dare smile at me i feel like you've you've this is a faint you've done this on purpose

nope uh but i guess that's a it's a breakdown of initiative um so next question edward baxter the pilot what happened to him i did lose track of him for a bit but i've got track of him again he just hasn't done anything to distinguish himself he's alive but he hasn't shot down any more planes so he's currently sitting at one a skill was he involved in the air combat we did today not this one he will be over the fourth indian good i'm gonna kill him i'll highlight that when it happens so watch the space hewitt because i'm going to kill edward baxter next play session i mean i sure hope not i'm gonna i'm gonna finally get my revenge on edward baxter the man needs to be stopped what he did was unforgivable and he needs to be undone

well if you're focusing on that you're not focusing on other stuff I'm focusing on all of it I'm a multi-faceted attack Andy I can't be stopped I'm everywhere all at once like that film that was nominated for an Oscar I believe

oh yeah with the googly eyes the googly eyes? I think someone on the post had like a googly eye on their forehead I've never actually seen the film I can't speak to it back to the email I guess again thank you both for making me laugh learn about history and the board game and have something to look forward to on fridays good luck

on your journey yours subtly humbly and bravely hewitt thank you very much for getting in touch hewitt there were some good questions yes it's much appreciated hewitt we're very very intrigued that you're doing a re-listen and those we'll find all the east eggs we left yeah they're sprinkled around those old episodes must be night and day compared to this one i mean we listened back to episode one when we did the anniversary episode and that was a vastly different piece of material to now so thank you for that hewitt the other that we have we have a message from milan not the place no no the individual who reads hello andy and james brackets the proper alphabetical order from texas i'm sending this email having just finished episode 25

so it will be weeks or possibly months. Monks? Monks? No, you just wrote monks. Yeah, I just said monks though. That's not good. I'm not able to read anymore. Before I know if you respond to it, and here we are, we have. Also, I apologize

for the length of this email. Do not apologize. We like a long arduous task, Milan. I'm an avid World War II wargamer, an RPG player of all sorts, and your podcast has the exact kind of energy as people. I love to tabletop game with which is which is incredibly i'm just saying incredibly i'm just making shit

up here which is probably why this is the first podcast i have ever listened to for more than two episodes wow that's a big merit thank you my first child is due next year congratulations what a gift and i suggest andy for a boy or james for a better boy i plan on using this podcast to soothe them to sleep so that by the time they grow into a young adult they will want to play games just like campaign for north africa uh you know what milan i think the trying to get them to play a big board game is a fun thing to try and raise your child to do i don't know if we should be the influence in this sphere to be there for the formative stages of a child's

development. Well, it's like playing Beethoven to your kid, but you don't want them to be good at piano. You want them to play a campaign for North Africa. That's a good point. You want them to be incredibly charismatic, subtle, humble, and brave fellows. So there you go. Your child will be subtle,

humble, and brave, and have a desert for a mind. That doesn't sound like a good thing for a child. We'll move away from this. This isn't very good milan i want the best for your child and i don't know that way that with all of that out the way i do have a few questions i want to throw your way you've mentioned playing dnd several times on your podcast and i wonder if you've played any

of their rpgs if so which ones have you enjoyed the most if not what kinds of games would you like to try uh i think primarily we've just played dnd and sort of modded it for our sci-fi setting and stuff so we but use that as a base other rpg i have played honey heist we've played that together we played that together at one point and i also game mastered it on a holiday with a bunch of people once i'd like to give that another go it's a very fun like quick afternoon and it's also like a bunch of people were being like i want to try dnd and it's like well we're not going to spend hours like getting you this is just a fun intro it's just one page but very i mean ludicrous and fun how would you describe the rules in a nutshell andy

well you can either do criminal stuff or bear stuff and as long as you have a hat on people won't mistake you for a bear because bears don't wear hearts and that's about it it's a very interesting concept for a game it's sort of dnd light so and it never went along those lines as we played a bit of it so everyone is john while your different voices and someone's head you all have different objectives yes you play as one character um john and yeah you have a sort of yeah series of voices in his head and different individuals who are playing the game have to vouch for control of john and you have to roll a die to see if you succeed at something and you're working towards your i

think it's a minor goal and a major goal so your character you're trying to vouch for john to succeed at certain things but if you ever fail at a task another player at the table takes control of john and has their own objectives so we i remember when we played it my idea was my major goal was to replace and and deck on an episode of and and deck saturday night takeaway a program which is aired in the uk and i think now finished and i think my primary goal was to hijack a light rail train it sounds right and i remember when you play that game your your voices version of john has a series of skills. I think you get three skills,

which means that the success roll on the die goes from a six to a five and a six, or maybe a four to a six. I think it's to a five. I think it's very, you're normally not going to succeed. And I remember one of our friends picked for one of their skills. It was jacking a fool's whip,

which is exactly how it was described. So that meant they could hijack cars with great efficiency. If the driver was a fool. I guess so, yeah. which made it very easy for them to get around. So whenever they took control of John, they could speed round very quickly. In essence, we've not played much in terms of RPGs.

We're very D&D heavy. We have a main medieval setting campaign, the typical D&D campaign that we've done for nine, eight years. It's coming to its big conclusion. Yes, we're doing the Avengers Endgame. We are. We're doing the big wrap-up after about... It's coming up to nine years. yeah i think to give you a sense of what's going on there without going into it too far i have one

two three four five six seven eight i have nine characters from previous campaigns that have come into this one and they are all way beyond level 20 yes they're all gods all infused with power at this point we have about 70 plus named npcs who are part of the big conflict uh our other friend who plays has another nine or so player characters same amount yeah and it's all it's all wrapping up so in terms of dnd we've got a big through line it's it's big we really enjoyed it so that's our big mainstay and that's us gushing over our rpg experience a little bit but yeah i guess that sort of answers that um and uh you continue also if you've not checked it out i recommend the bovington tank museum it has a lot of great history including the legendary tank tiger 131

that was captured in the north african theater you can walk right up to it and touch it and read the history of how the british captured it that's an interesting do you know where that is you got that up now and i'm currently checking it seems to be because a museum trip i think at some point is definitely in store for us oh we're gonna do a museum tour at some point we won't host we're not we're not permitted to host southwest it's on the south coast near weymouth okay so we could go yeah it's in the uk it's close to bournemouth we could get there it'll be a hell of a trek but we can get there we could break it up we could do the york armory on the way oh we're gonna do a we're gonna do a national tour of museums yeah i say we do that let's say next year we'll book some time

off we'll do that why the fuck not i would love to do that yeah well there we go that goes more of my social life and milan finishes off with shout out to my brother and wargaming buddy pete who everyone agrees is subtle humble and brave unlike myself milan sent from the deserts of my mind well milan i've got no doubt you are subtle humble and brave yourself but also yeah shout out to pete you are also subtle humble and brave anyone who listens is subtle humble and brave by sheer definition yeah you're all and be so humble and brave and stay so humble and brave exactly because you already are all of you and on that note our our put back to you our interaction with you is not just today's episode but also the video that we promised would be out a little

while ago of us unboxing the game for the first time this was on the anniversary episode is now finally available and we promise if you look for it now on youtube if you search war with a mate and get our channel up it's there it's available right now you can check it it's really there yes that one will be up and the other one where we punch the pieces out will put up soon as well yes so the first one is definitely out youtube had a real gripe with us because we put links to the podcast in the description and it wouldn't allow us to verify and i took a six second video of my face and it said that's not a person send me a passport and then i did that and it said no because we are andy and i ai generated we are not real people this has all been one big experiment

of ai we are is it grok no let's not be that one it's been one of the ones that's not a weird nazi that's a good point well i guess by definition in the game i am i guess oh yeah maybe maybe grok did this or maybe maybe it's chat gbt maybe it's the mainstream one who knows but all in all it wouldn't it wouldn't accept us as real people but there we are we are real and if you want to get in touch with us two real people you can do so through our email address which is info at warwithamate.co.uk our web form which is on our website which is warwithamate.co.uk or instagram which is just war with a mate we accept messages always and we have found out recently there is a bit of a backlog on our web form it wasn't notifying us when we

received them so if you've sent a web form in we've got a bunch of them i get through as well picking them up over the next few weeks absolutely and as we vouched in the past i made the promise every single piece of mail that we get as long as you would like it to be read we will read it out we will get to it at some point we will absolutely answer it just send it over we will get there it could be anything ideally about the game but if it's not that doesn't matter we'll still read it and we'll still give our opinions however frail they may be but andy that's enough of the here and now it's time to go back to the then and there so what does history look like in the past well we're continuing the story of the seventh and operation compass ah they are pushing on

through they are destroying my guys yeah we've got a quippy little quote for you never has so much been surrendered by so many to so few it's said by a foreign secretary at the time anthony eden who'd later become prime minister i believe as a play on the famous churchill quote about the battle of britain i don't know i've seen some pretty bad kickstarters where people give up a lot of money to something that will never manifest uh yeah but i think 130 000 people haven't surrendered i guess 20 000 when they're giving up their lives yeah yeah that's a different scale a bit so we last had them they'd taken uh to brook and at this point the british get reliable intelligence that the italian 10th army is retreating from benghazi to tripoli using the

via balbo just trying to get out of libya the old balbo road or serenica to be precise but so at this point general kind of splits the force the sixth australians will continue along the main road while the seventh we're going to move directly across the desert to the coast south of benghazi to intercept this retreating army and not let it get away the route along the via balba is 200 miles the route they're going to take the seventh armored is going to take across the desert is 150 miles through a unmapped waterless route yes i believe i know the area that it's mentioned in the previous section i think i know exactly where they're going yes so just to give you a sense but the state of their armor at this point is pretty poor they have 80 light tanks and 40

cruisers split along through the a9 a10 and a13 variants they start out with like 205 or 250 tanks so they're whittled down primarily through maintenance rather than uh destruction but their supply situation here means that if this pursuit is going to be successful it has to finish in three days or they'll run out of water fuel and ammo i know that feeling oh yeah that's me every single play session yeah which is also a crazy thing to throw this force in on like we've got we've got nothing we've got we've got half a week so on the 4th of february they start their journey across the desert the tanks are going slow and needing constant maintenance um so because of this decision sorry because of this they make the decision to send a motorized force of infantry

armored cars and artillery head under the command of john combi who have you'll remember put together another um sort of mismatched force earlier to fight an italian artillery position yes yes this is where this force gets the name combi force which is where it all come from it's about 2 000 men they set off to block the road and delay the italians until the armor can show up set head off of about 2 000 men from the rest of the 7th by this is on the 4th of february by 3 p.m the armored cars have traveled 94 kilometers to the small town of musa whose garrison has fled at the sight of these approaching cars or i guess in our game i've starved them so they're dead yes uh either way they don't put up much of a fight so on the 5th of february uh 1941 by noon

the initial parts of the combi force reach the road over the next two hours uh the breakaway force takes position second rifle brigade across the road itself while also placing some elements to the west blocking the space between the dunes and the sea and then that distance is roughly two miles uh but it sort of changes up and down the route but yeah so behind them they set up an artillery line uh and then they have the 11th hussars in like armored cars and light tanks out to the east taking advantage of their mobility to stop anyone looping around through the desert to get behind them so half an hour later the first italians arrive and hit a minefield which the combi force have been putting up in front of their positions which is when the brits launched

their the first ambush which starts this battle it throws the italians into disarray at being attacked this far behind their lines like they're retreating from benghazi the last they heard these guys were in tabrook and now they're blocking the road for their retreat like they're trying to retreat so they didn't know how to attack down the road uh while some of us some try to attack others try to retreat others try to find a way around it's just sort of a mess for the italians and their initial efforts efforts were weak because most of their artillery and armor was further north getting ready to leave benghazi yeah it makes sense that they don't have them there and ready yeah they're not expecting this as the day continues more and more italians start

to arrive and it's forming like a miles long traffic jam essentially the road is just full of vehicles and people just backing up so the combi force here their goal is to delay while the armor arrives um so the tanks left uh musub which they'd taken at 7 30 in the morning but only arrived within radio range at 4 p.m so this initial force has held the road for most of a day by themselves so when they do the vehicles do arrive uh they're a bit late because they had to move through single file to get through a minefield and this must be so scary as the italians the road ahead of you is blocked to the east behind the dunes you can't see it huge dust clouds start to come up as the tanks like rumble across the terrain and it's just like what the

hell is coming for us so at first maybe they just think it's a sandstorm possibly yeah i mean there are sandstorms around this time but this is february it's raining for a lot of this by the way as well it's miserable weather i wonder if they would think it's a sand i wonder if they'd see the sand first and think it's a sandstone before they get eyes on the tanks they definitely saw it a long time before i don't know if they'd be like that's i can sort of recognize a vehicle column or if they're just like oh can't escape into the desert there's a sandstorm so the first to arrive are the seventh hussars followed by the third hussars and the second royal tank regiment who have slower vehicles combi uh via radio tells them to attack along the length of the column

at three points which are three miles apart to give you a sense of the length of this column they're like it's over 10 miles long to create uh confusion and to alleviate some of the pressure blocking the front combi while he was looking at the land had found a series of ridges close to the road which was shaped just nicely enough that tanks could hide behind it and then come and peek out and fire and then get behind the dunes again like so there's just tanks appearing and disappearing out of nowhere that's scary stuff oh yeah especially i've just watched the film fury again recently which is about tanks in world war ii um american tanks but just yeah what what what that film does for tank warfare i can picture this vividly in terms of that film it's scary

stuff if they can do that as they start to attack the italians they hit several fuel trucks which will start to burn the sun sets around sort of 6 p.m at this point but these burning trucks will illuminate the night fighting little beacons yeah but at this point the british tanks are siphoning fuel from their motorized artillery into their tanks because they're that they're running that like low they do have some supplies coming in after them it'll be quite a while as night falls there's a slight break in the action but continual skirmishes it does give the italians a chance to get some organization going but it does the british allow it to happen because it lets them rearm and refuel and let some of their slower elements get closer so there's a bit of a deadlock during the

night during the night though at 1.2 italian tanks do appear but they surrender when a single trooper with a pistol climbs on top knocks on the hatches and like gets them to surrender so this one guy captures two tanks what right okay so this speaks immediately to what's going wrong yeah because they're letting men with a single with a handgun just walk up and they're getting on and they're taking two tanks yeah i couldn't find more about this guy but i'm gonna look for more because i couldn't find a name but this guy sounds pretty interesting well from what i understand if it's if it's the the italian tanks we've talked about in the past they have to pivot almost like a michael keaton batman where they have to rotate the entire tank so the tank's so close that the other tank

didn't have time to move and he sort of gets on top and he's like don't move or i'll get on top of you too and he'll just dance between the two with this handgun i think this is just a microcosm of this whole operation compass as well it's like one guy has captured four guys and two tanks by himself like ridiculous stuff so during the night the british artillery is also they're firing like pot shots and then moving it and then firing more pot shots to give the impression that there's like a bigger artillery line behind them uh because they can't see it because of the dunes and stuff so the italians don't actually know what's against them they're also just laying mines throughout the night in front of them again like rebuilding the minefield and while all this is

happening the artillery australians are moving along the north they've captured barcer barker and then oh yes yeah oh i know where we are we're map b we're top of my yes uh and in the morning they're going to attack benghazi so the the italian 10th army fleeing benghazi into the jaws of the seventh while the australians are pursuing them there's some fighting along the miles long battle line at this point through the night and in the morning for example there's a major tank engagement uh the italians are sending like waves of 30 tanks at a time and 10 to 30 sorry and then when they're roughly half a kilometer away from these ridges i've mentioned uh the second royal tank regiment poke their guns over the ridges rapidly just destroy eight tanks and then head

back down the ridge move further along pop up again and destroy seven so just obliterating the tanks yeah to give you a sense of how the second royal tank regiment it has 19 cruisers at like the most it has available during this entire fight they account for roughly a hundred italian tanks just that unit at the cost ultimately of four of their tanks which were damaged by artillery they lose more to like breakdowns and lack of fuel that sounds like true to the game that is that's verisimilitude at its finest yeah in fact they fully run out of ammo at one point and have to wait for an ammo truck to arrive to refill them and the italians just don't know that and don't attack during that time but if they had they the tanks would just have no i don't feel bad

at the game anymore yeah that's vindication it's raining heavily by the way through all of this oh my god it's real life yeah it's real life temperatures are like four degrees celsius to 10 degrees celsius throughout the day it's a miserable day for this to be happening to you so about 11 o'clock the italians try to make free attacks against the roadblock in like three waves they get held off the first two were just fairly weak pushes the third is a bit more serious as they've brought tanks and guns forwards despite this the italians start to surrender when the british anti-tank guns start to make an interest uh an impact so just to keep in mind while all this is happening the british are also taking thousands of prisoners and moving them to an

improvised holding area yeah i keep on forgetting that they're they've also just got an army to feed yeah and keep safe while also pushing on yeah the fighting continues throughout the day at one point the first royal tank regiment who are in reserve uh get released to go and help the second uh royal tank regiment and the seven facades this is a vital piece of timing because between breakdowns damage and refueling they only had six operational tanks at the time uh that they arrived the commander of the first royal tank regiment comes up surveys the road sort of in front of him and just sees hundreds of lorries tanks men buses and just lets loose just basically just fires everything at the road causing just immense general panic italians are trying to like escape now

i love the term immense general panic as well because it's intense yeah but it's everywhere yeah so all the while this is happening uh the seventh have gone up and they found the back of the convoy and i started to i wrote it down as they've started to chew their way through the column from the back um you're burning the candle at both ends oh yeah like this could have gone differently but the italians are just so battered at this point like because this is such an aggressive move but as night falls uh which yes said around 6 p.m the tanks pull back for maintenance at this point the entire brigade the entire 7th division is down to 101 tanks which are 39 undamaged 48 which have taken hits but are still operational and 17 are just totally

non-functional they start operation compass with 275 tanks so i'll leave you uh i'll leave you with the image of a 10 mile stretch of road littered with literally hundreds of destroyed tanks and vehicles lit by burning fuel trunks and vehicles and just italians staggering through the night trying to regroup trying to find food and a lot of them looking for someone british to surrender to and there's one day one more day left of this battle which is called the battle of better form uh but we'll pick that and the end of operation compass up uh next week wow what a what a cliffhanger you've left us on for the the penultimate episode that is quite the picture to paint because that sounds like a fucking nightmare yeah this is one of the first times i've been reading this where

i've just felt sorry for the italian like there's a lot like graziani's absolute piece of shit and like the high alert but just being like a bus driver who's like yeah take some guys from benghazi to tripoli and then you just what the fuck is going on oh no i'm suffering immense general panic that's insane being in that situation where the fuel trucks are just ablaze all you can see are destroyed vehicles the silhouettes yeah of metal chunks just scattered across this road seeing people wandering around and wondering is this some of us or am i just gonna wander over and it's someone who with the same handgun he's pointing at me now to end my life he just captured two tanks yeah and they've appeared out of nowhere through the desert from your perception

like you you know the australians are coming along the road because that's sort of you already uh evacuating benghazi but this is like that sped it up you're not expecting a roadblock well this is the long range desert group all over again but just dialed up to a a division yeah yeah it's just appearing out of the desert and it's like well shit out of the was it the fifth dimension the fourth dimension that he described it as yeah bagnell describes it as appearing out of the fourth dimension yeah they're just here they're upon you and it's a division this time that's a yeah what a terrifying situation what a horrible world to live in all of a sudden yeah well that can just happen to you at that point you must question everything you've known about the war

because you thought you were a sure thing yeah a month ago literally a month almost to the day you sallied forth over the italian over the egyptian border with quarter of a million men to fight 30 000 men and then you've had one of probably one of the worst months in military history is this is this a custer situation i don't know what i'll go over some of it a bit but like this is an insane level of aggression from the british like pushing everything to the limit and it it's sort of it will set a false expectation of what's possible later on but it's because the italians are so defensive that them being overly aggressive makes sense yes whereas when they're fighting the like more aggressive germans you can't get away with this shit like

yeah yeah this works on this group yeah but in future you can't apply this as a blanket rule no this was this was this is under preparedness on one side under preparedness under equipness and i guess good tactical work and just luck seems to play into history so much more than i gave anticipation for i genuinely think based on all of these history segments so far that look is definitely the biggest swing in all of this oh it's definitely like impactful but there's also like it's the italian supplies like i think i mentioned when we were doing the like what's everyone got at the start a few weeks ago the italian tanks they have to stop get out like unpack a radio and like radio in to like get more orders all the british tanks have a radio built

into them which is why they're able to perform this level of coordination and like fight a battle across 10 miles in like yeah coordinated like step yeah this is a crazy like route two things i had questions on the back of that yeah was and i don't know if you'll know as the sage of history or if maybe a listener knows or if it's something i'll just have to research in between is one operation combus yes do we know what was named after what where the name came from uh oh no that's a good point i don't know how the british named them at all i don't know if it's a random name off a list or if it's to do with some of the like the actual tactical players yeah because it's it's it's a name that holds a lot of weight in this campaign but i've just i've heard

it so many times i've never thought a question what it means was it to do with the objective i'm i presume it wasn't a posthumous name it was probably one that was given during the operation it was for the because remember again this is meant to be a five-day exploratory raid to push them back like 10 miles which is why i'm interested as to what that name would have meant compared to what it ended up being i don't know for certain but i feel like you should pick your name off like a randomized list of operations rather than have like a one that actually indicates what it is you're trying to do yeah that feels like bad information security like if it's like operation ridge breaker and you're trying to push the enemies against a ridge they can be like okay

we should defend the ridge yeah get away from the ridge yeah and the other question i had was and this is a more obscure one you probably won't know this someone might though is when i mentioned there about seeing this like big dust cloud coming and you've got all the prisoners do you reckon there's been a situation where you've you know you've got a hundred thousand prisoners in tow and there's only thirty thousand of you do you gather around the prisoners and put them in amongst your ranks to make it look like you're massively bolstered or is that far too risky to just all of a sudden have these vast quantity of prisoners heading towards their allies i don't know about riskiness i feel like that's probably against the geneva convention that that was my other

yeah i think there's stuff about using enemy combatants as like decoys or cannon fodder cannon fodder yeah because my thought was to make it appear more intimidating so that the enemies retreat the risk of course is that the enemy sees them and starts gunning them down at which point you've just yeah i guess you could do the whole like hold your hands up well i didn't kill them but that's still you have you've killed them by proxy yeah i just wonder if there's ever been a moment where it's been tactically viable but also on the fence enough where you can go well this was okay i didn't put them in harm's way technically i think i'd have to look it up i think the mongols and some other like more ancient armies would drive like captured prisoners and slaves in front

of the army okay to like eat up missile fire and stuff but i think once you get to this once you've sort of got a geneva convention the thing is you stick to that because you then can sort of expect to get it yeah you don't want that coming back to bite you don't like the japanese and the russians it's like all bets are off all bets are off here because everyone involved is just doing the worst thing possible to their opponent

yeah I'm very glad that the history segments that we cover will not really touch on a whole lot of that because some of the stuff about Japanese prisoners of war and the stuff they get up to that is

just barbaric this might be wrong about this but i think the japanese high command deliberately made them treat prisoners badly so that the japanese troops would have an expectation of if i surrender we've done all this horrible stuff it'll be done to me oh right a deliberate tactic to get their soldiers not to surrender yes i guess yeah it could either be a case of they did that so that that could be sort of advertised or maybe they were doing that anyway for whatever reasons they had in mind to do it and then made a public knowledge to sort of go well we're doing this who knows what's going on

over there or even if they aren't doing it we've done it maybe you'll get worse treatment for it and then the eastern front was essentially just a pall into hell yeah that's thankfully we're dealing with well it was described as the war without hate yeah i'm gonna have to do an episode debunking that because it it's not but uh yeah it's it's had some to the other theaters it's i guess what we've seen what we've seen isn't hate-filled it seems to be and this is a broad sweeping statement from someone who's only learned from it through the history segments and everything we've got so far it seems to be relatively fair military combat and i say that with the disclaimer of not knowing everything at all but that's my perception so far yeah a year

into learning stuff about this more so but there is definitely uh atrocities against the local jewish population once the germans arrive uh particularly from the ss obviously well that's it i guess that's another thing we're looking at the early stages this is back when it's the italian commonwealth conflict when the nazis arrive and also all the bits in between we're covering the broad strokes about military units that we're familiar with and we've done history segments on higher up figures yeah uh i've got no doubt there will be some pretty heinous shit that goes on well i think also i think it's important to when you're talking about the local population here is the libyan genocide had killed and like 50 and displaced 80 of the people

living in the region which means like by the time this conflict's happening there's not many locals yes in the same way there's a lot of italian colonists but you've eradicated the native population that would have been hit by the brunt of that like war crime concentration camp stuff they'd sort of already done it yeah you're sort of going well we haven't really done anything to anyone here it's like yeah there's no one fucking left already did it before this started yeah you did it before the battle you've done before the conflict they're already suffering those losses yeah that's a good point that is sort of a proxy of well we haven't done anything wrong here it would be kind of like this is probably not a great analogy but if like in the like mid 30s

germany had killed all of the jews and then you had the war in the 40s and you were looking at that like the western front and you're going well there was not many atrocities there and it's like well they've already done it which i also imagine does translate to history because of the creeping push of fascist movements yeah through europe there are probably a lot more people killed between the every target audience of the holocaust yeah i imagine a lot of people were killed in the build-up to that before whatever declaration of war encapsulates that as war losses yeah so it's yeah i guess it's one of those things that's kind of up in the air but is definitively evil oh yeah there's no two ways about that there it's fucked from go

well as always a very interesting history segment one that i think we've started to delve into the darker sides and the the horrors of it we found ourselves slipping into the serious there andy we yeah we need to pull ourselves up and and if you'll take my hand from operation ridge pusher whatever it was that i coined earlier i'm going to hold your hand will you pull me up over this ridge i will i've got some common ground for you lift me up something nice and light lift me up and now for something nicer a little oasis in the wall it's time for some common ground i'm trying to intro the common ground i'm recording maybe yeah okay so here's my common ground franchises should have to have a fallow year

okay all right okay i'm gonna i'm gonna come in here first of all and say generally from what you've just offered here i i would probably agree with this okay yeah i i don't disagree with this um the the concept by the way for common ground for anyone who isn't aware yes it's really gone ahead of myself my fear is someone comes in and this is their first episode and they don't understand common ground it's the segment in which we come together andy and i after a long week of conflict and we find a common ground to unite on become friends over and then next week we can continue the campaign for north africa and today you're suggesting a a fallow year was it yes every franchises every franchise has one yeah so

what would that entail so like fallow year just for it's like when your farmers like leave a field and don't plant it every like five to seven years so they can like the soil can recover and like glastonbury the music festival does it i think every four years where they'll just be like we're not doing it this year so the ground doesn't get too fucked up yes yeah uh i think four years is a good cycle for this um things i have in mind uh marvel star wars call of duty fifa i think every sort of four maybe every five years they should have a year they don't do anything with it there's no like no movies no like disney plus show there's not a fifa for that year just every once in a while you block and the franchise just doesn't do anything

that year lets the fatigue sort of die down a bit and the people working on it have a sort of year to get ideas rather than churning stuff out i i agree with this overall okay the i have a few amendments and it doesn't really contest the idea of this it's more about where we apply it so this is one where we agree generally and we're going to get into the details i think so i think so because i agree with this i think when it comes to right so you mentioned fifa yeah i i don't think fifa would benefit from this i don't play fifa i'm not i'm not into sports at all i i've played fifa a few times at like house parties but fifa is it's sports it's an annual event they release the game every year and i think with fifa there isn't any real benefit to be gained from taking

a year off i think with that one what needs to be restructured in my humble opinion as someone who is someone who doesn't play the game is that you just have fifa it's just a subscription like world of warcraft and then you yeah it's one of those games where it really feels like it would benefit from just a live service game there's so many games that don't work that way i would almost never advocate for a live service game it's always the wrong choice it seems like that business model is custom made for fifa they released halo infinite they were like well this is going to be the halo game for the next 10 years we'll update it constantly no no no make a new halo game every few years make a new campaign release a new multiplayer keep it cyclical every three four

years that works a game that is a it's a sporting seasonal game you get new players that come into the game every every season that works perfectly because you then you can update it not just annually but you can update it every every season this is me being so alien i don't really know much about football but there's a football season that comes in i've got friends who play i don't play it much um but it will be like oh yeah the the throw-ins are better this year or like the free kit it's like the mechanics maybe to an extent yeah to such a minor degree it's like that could have just been a patch yeah you've kind of already perfected the skeleton of the game especially at this age maybe every five to ten years you make a new game but the concept behind it should be

it's a live service between then yeah in fact fifa has a reverse follow year where you do one and you want every four yes yes everything should be a patch before then and if there's a big technological breakthrough where you can make the game fundamentally different you release one for the first year of like each console generation basically yes that would work perfectly and then you patch it supporting it yeah um the other one you mentioned call of duty i think in my i think it needs one to be honest in my in my opinion of it um again i don't play a whole lot of call of duty did back in the day oh yeah and i hope this isn't just me being a um a short-sighted back in my day person but it used to be very good it used to feel like an event every year and i don't know

if i'm just out of touch but black ops like seven or eight is coming out or has come out yeah and that to me and again i don't know if it's me distorting the passage of time i'm like wow they're really churning these out now i think it's partially that but also it's like modern warfare was like oh wow yeah and then even world at war which wasn't as good a game was like oh wow and then when the first black ops came out by the guys who were doing the world at war ones it was like oh they're doing something fresh and new yes uh and now it feels like that's yeah maybe out of touch but i think it it trying to do one every year just really messes them up but i think that might be a series that's now become that i think that might be one

that's sort of too far gone but i think that's why if you have a break for a year it could gives it some space like but is it enough space i think for something like that you might need something more drastic that might need to just be like we're putting this on the back burner and we'll release a uh remastered edition of modern warfare 2 in like a decade yeah that could be a hiatus game however when it comes to i think film is really where this comes in particularly what i put card and fifa on there because it was another like thing that comes out every year but i really think for film and particularly universes yes because i don't want them to do like oh we're not doing any marvel films this year but we're going to put eight series on disney plus i just

it's like we're not doing marvel for a year yes and i think because then you like put that maybe opposite the year you're not doing star wars yes you keep having stuff coming out overall but those franchises get a break they get a chance to get some like fertility back in the soil as it were like some creative i i agree with this i think at the risk of us sounding like every youtube commenter yeah about every marvel film the kind of people who try to put disney to rights and i know there's a million and one people who do this but i it's something i definitely agree with in its in its principle because i think i i love i love the marvel films i think they're very good films for for the most part i think when i i think after endgame and again this is just me

sounding like every fucking person who talks about this um this is not an original idea but i think after end game things petered off a bit you ended up with a combination of oversaturation and maybe less creative input as well and things became a bit of a churn and again it's rich from someone who puts something out every week and it's the same thing we've played the game we're playing the game but we know that we're doing that we're a fifa yeah yeah i don't play fifa i don't particularly enjoy fifa but we are a fifa we are something that will continue regularly forever that's the structure a film franchise shouldn't be that i think it might's a bit i think you caught the wire the wire good tv show never seen it i think films do benefit from a

i think they've been releasing some all right stuff recently oh you got great stuff they're like too much fatigue yeah whereas i think if everyone had a bit of a break they would have enjoyed like thunderbolts and fantastic four more yeah you've got great films coming out it's just how you release them when you release them how it interconnects when you've got 25 films or whatever it was before endgame that all play into each other and there's like four five a year it all kind of works i think it also works for sort of the ncis law and order type show that's a good point i've not actually thought about the procedurals i think sometimes some of those super long-running procedurals could benefit from a like i'm not a big soap guy but like

imagine if like coronation street or east end has had a year in the writer's room i think every five to i think soaps are a bad probably not that the whole thing is there a daily thing but i guess yeah they're another one but i think that structure demands a dip because i think that's sort of you tap in every day yeah the thing is i i get what you mean i know exactly what you mean i think it's just that there's so much that relies on it through its nature it's easy to confuse with the stuff that really needs it and i think films films should not be that films should not be a soap opera no film should be something if you're doing a big film franchise it should be an event it shouldn't be oversaturated well i think what it is you

shouldn't be able to be burdened with having to watch stuff you can't afford the time to watch you shouldn't have to make it a struggle for people to be up to date i also think if you put that gap in every it like breaks up the risk of it becoming formulaic yes uh you need to be able to as a casual viewer tap in watch everything and still enjoy the franchise as a whole yeah but if you've got if you've got five or six films you've got three tv series they're all eight episodes per season and they've all got weird side characters and there's crossovers from the other show which you need to watch beforehand you can't dip in anymore you can't watch you know it's like you can't go back you can watch you know uh that's an american civil war it's like a it's a captain

america film got all the characters in as well as the creative break for the people making it also gives people a chance to it's like i can watch four years of i can watch three years of marvel stuff over four years without falling behind just gives people a chance to if they want to catch up i you know what i i can't really argue with this as an idea because i enjoy watching stuff that i've followed for a long time we talk about scream around halloween we watched it um a few years ago and new one's coming out it's been a bit of a delay there was a lot of behind the scenes reasons for it controversial but i think overall the the gap in between it's helps stuff makes me excited i'm hyped for i'm really excited for when that comes out that's

why i think netflix haven't had a hit in a while it's because they drop it all at once well you don't have the anticipation and speculation well you got stranger things that's out now um i'm rewatching i'm watching that again now the um the last season i'm watching that now i've only watched episode one so far but i'm excited to see how that wraps up that's one i've picked up and at first i didn't think i'd like it but it's good and another one for me personally a big one and it's not so much i think there's been other stuff released but my favorite book is house of leaves which i've mentioned before on this yeah that came out in 2000 new book just came out tom's crossing by marxie danieluski and he's had other books in

in between but this one has it felt like it had a lot of momentum behind the release and that's what 25 years between the two and i think books yes it takes a lot more to write a book because it's one guy usually it's one author so i think that has a cadence that carries more to read a book like most books you read will be longer than yes the experience of reading it it's more active and also like a book is like even if you're a fast reader like you can sort of a page a minute so it's like five hours for a 300 page book yeah it's at least days for most people yeah if not weeks depending on the book and the reader so i think that for me when i've been reading that recently i've got it a few days ago the cadence of going from the media i consume at the moment

which is i'll be honest a lot of just fast-paced disposable media a lot of youtube short sort of tiktok and then going back to reading a book for the first time in a good few months last book i read was like but like page to page months ago i think so getting into this is i think really an indicator of why this is a good idea i think we should have a good break between stuff and i feel this isn't a usual common ground because usually we get into the wacky stuff yeah but this is something i genuinely believe in and it's just a really good point i have ardent belief in this is right this is good yeah this isn't a common ground andy this is just correct this is just an idea that people need to listen to so i guess on that on the back of that if anyone has a a counterpoint

to that or any franchise they think should really benefit from the fallow year or alternatively a franchise that really shouldn't have the fallow yeah let us know I this is a topic I'm personally very invested in because the cadence of art I think is a very delicate thing

to address yeah and it's sort of just go go go now because it's like studios and stuff you're sort of also killing your golden goose so let's have a few days off every now and again

yeah see what happens when you let things breathe it's probably going to be beautiful you'll maybe get a bigger egg and on that note we'll be back next week and every other week for the rest of our lives talking about the same game over and over again

reading emails from yourselves talking about some history just rehashing everything we do every week nothing changes it's the same thing if you like familiar stuff you've come to the right place because it's always going to be the same thing

it's always going to be the same people it's always going to be the same game the same vibe everything will stay uniform if you want to get in touch and address any of that whether it's to ask a question or complain about what I've just said ask us to change the structure which I promise we will do very little to do

the email address is info at warwithamate.co.uk the website is warwithamate.co.uk and the Instagram is just warwithamate but do you have anything else to share thanks for listening stay so humble and brave in the deserts of your minds

goodnight We'll be right back.