War With A Mate - Episode 57: The Camel Conclusion

Episode Date: January 3, 2026

The end of the year brings an unprecedented end to one of the most enigmatic parts of the game; the camels. In an incredibly ambitious assault on Alexandria by James, both he and Andy see heavy losses that turn their perception of the game on its head. This bumper-sized episode sees another 7th-centered history segment, a mailbag segment that delves into the structure of this project and a Common Ground that encourages the world to be Subtle, Humble and Brave.

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or wherever you get your podcasts Hello, one and all, and welcome to War with a Mate, the final War with a Mate of the Year, with me, James. Me, Andy. This is it. The year has come to an end, Andy. What a year it's been. Ah, it's been a long one. 2025, one that will go down in the books of history as one of the years that happened. Historically, that is true. it's been quite a full look back on this one yeah there's been some some highs some lows

some worldwide controversies some tragedies some joys some triumphs and a lot of board game too much board game for us it sort of eclipsed a lot of that other stuff yeah all of the tragedies they they sort of pale in comparison to what we're doing it's deeply tragic but it's kind of beautiful as well well yeah let's cling to that bit well i'm james i'm andy and we've been playing the campaign for north africa as always and it's been a fun one yeah we're on turn three upstage two uh we're doing your movement today we have we've done my movement and what a movement it was i had fun today and it was quite the day yeah uh should we get into what happened then yeah i guess we should probably tick it off because we left last time with me hot on the heels of a nasty

fight against your guys my wall that i've been moving along the north coast they were pushed back they were sent with their tail between their legs back over to map c get out of here but i wasn't entirely broken in spirit i still had a bit of fire in my heart a bit of zest and that played out today and not with that wall because no that wall stayed where they are they retreated and they have remained there yeah you left them to lick their wounds and i decided to pick my fights and pick my fights i really did because i kept them there but i did move some others around yeah you had quite a lot of moves here well two uh two divisions got tasked with hunting truck bandits those truck bandits have become a problem for me and i decided today i've had enough so no

more trying to box them in with a few gun units i decided i'm going to send a division after each of your truck bandits and they were they were sent running they were sent with their tail between their legs and definitely with a much more heightened sense of fear than i had when i left the wall yeah they did uh you barraged them both they managed to avoid getting pinned and then just retreated before assault because they can't fight a division yeah i boxed them in real nice they've been sent scuttling into a sort of choke point now that they're coming together for one last stand

as my divisions are flanking them on either side. My 62nd Mamara and 64th Cantanero, I want to say. They've really closed in on them. Two divisions are coming after two battalions. Which is kind of worth it on my end.

I don't know because I wasn't going to do anything else with them. Those guys have just sat around. Oh, okay. Maybe not then. They're holding the back line. I've got them busy behind, I was going to say behind enemy lines, behind friendly lines. Behind your own lines. Yeah, they're doing stuff that really they shouldn't have to be doing.

You shouldn't have got this far anyway. But I decided they're going to try and pick them off. So they're now having a bit of a cat and mouse game, chasing them around, following them. One of them we still need to resolve because they have chased them. We didn't resolve that combat. Oh, I thought you'd stopped chasing. Are they also? The 62nd have chased a little further.

okay so we'll start next time that is the last combat to resolve but i thought you're having all this fun with these truck bandits why don't i get in on this yeah that's a horror and detachment are we we jump into them the saharan detachment really had their their last tango today not only the saharan detachment but most vitally the most important part of this end of year conclusion is that the camels are done no camels in 2026 it's going to be a camel free year for us well it'll be a camel free scenario they will rear their head once again if it's a camel for a year we've really really messed up we've really dragged our hooves the camels are no more they've been defeated and it's not in the way that i thought or hoped it would happen but we do finally have

a conclusion can we do a little zoom in on this unit and sort of talk about the experience of being a member of them so so the saharan detachment had quite the ordeal over this off stage they're overlooking the qatara depression in the middle of the desert they've just been bombed by your aircraft yeah middle of nowhere and they were pinned well of this group there were five infantry within this detachment one gun one of the infantry being a recon so they were they were sat there two of the infantry had been pinned by your bombardment from the air and i was looking at them today and i thought you know what james today is the day you're gonna be bold the sahara detachment have been slowly creeping further east every single

op stage for the last turn turn in a bit and i thought this was this was my time i've had enough of your bullshit so what i did is i detached the two pinned inventory so the commander of this detachment has gone to those two look you're you're licking your wounds from the bombing you're a little shell shocked we're gonna leave you here don't worry don't worry you're here we're gonna leave you with a single water truck you have your water truck you have the trucks that you're in you're still motorized you have some water to get you by you have fuel in your tanks this is not the end this is simply the beginning in fact you guys come and support us next guy you guys you guys recover from what's happened you can meet us and you can meet us not just anywhere you're going

to meet us at alexandria because we are going to push north from the qataran depression we're going to move all the way up to the northern roads we're going to mow through three airfields kill all of the sgs use in there we're going to continue driving far east we're going to go all the way across the road from map d to map e we're going to arrive at alexandria and we're going to break the line of that small garrison there and we are going to claim alexandria for ourselves huge move take my supplies out from under me cut out your air force completely destroy your major bombing airfield and then arrive at alexandria's front door blow it wide open with the saharan detachment which outnumbers your garrison there and wreak havoc allowing me to plant myself in there and

hold it out for the rest of the scenario winning me Graziani's offensive. It was a really it's a flawless plan but you did have to push the boys a little hard they were running a little ragged when they got to Alexandria. So the issue comes from the nature of the game's capability point allowance you see people can't do everything forever now description of people now that applies not just to the board game that applies to real life now the concept of entropy is one that i've wrestled with for a while in this game and today it really came to fruition because my plan i knew had flaws it was not flawless in the sense that it couldn't go wrong it was a risky move i think it could be generously described as high risk high reward it could be generously

described as a suicide mission in fact better than generous it could be accurately described as a suicide mission and those guys didn't want to do a suicide mission so they get to alexandria and we get into some combat i fire off a barrage that sort of pins one group and what uh what are the rest of them up to well to paint the full picture they drove up from the qataran depression along some tracks, and then they met the northern road. Not the Balbo, that's the one further along, isn't it? Or is this the Balbo?

No, the Balbo is in Libya. It's not joined up to the Egyptian coast road. That's probably why this went so badly. If I was on the Balbo, this would have been funny. Yeah, you would have been driven forwards by the ghost of Balbo.

But instead, with the road being broken, the spirit of Balbo can't pass over. It can't connect. the spectral nature of him doesn't allow him to move over a broken road that scary weird ghost with a big fish but what I can do is drive along the road

that is still intact so what I did do is drive through three of your airfields and mow down every single SJSU in there, I killed upwards of a hundred men easily, you got rid of my Moraine fighters, which are I only have six of them but they're

alright, they're like a weird holdover i don't even know if i get that many more of them you got me rid of my life sanders which kind of suck but they could strafe which was all right and my bombay bombers which are my highest bomb to plane ratio they're my they're the sort of hammer of my air force yeah they're your real we're the hammer of my air force well the good news for you is the planes are still there yes in a turn some sgs thieves will show up at alexandria and whiz along the road and just find like have you seen those weird like graveyards of military equipment and like they'll like show up there and be like better get these planes working yeah you know what i have a

very vivid picture um painted just from what you've described there and i don't know if i think it's something i've seen from a film but it's those sort of airfields where there's the concrete bunkers that are nestled on the side of airfields yeah and then you've just got a bunch of aircraft just sat there dormant which for what i know being a pilot at this time you would love to have a concrete bunker and not be living in a shack made of boxes and those shacks of boxes did nothing to defend your sgsus because when the saharan detachments came in in trucks and those trucks were also for some reason full of camels they showed up they had the the camels jump out the back of the trucks mowed down these sgsus getting some vengeful retribution for what

happened at fort madelena oh so long ago and from there they continued the push through several more empty airfields just sat there ready for the taking making them allied airfields i went through a total of six airfields on my journey to alexandria and the men were happy the men suffered breakdown points that were building up all the way up to that road but when they're on that road it's plain sailing they sort of hit the road with some bad morale from uh pushing themselves through the desert which is going to be important and that's where the entropy comes in you see getting them up to that road took them just over their cpa allowance which is it's not ideal however i thought why not now continuing to push them that far east was risky um to a fault because pushing

them that far to get them to the doors of alexandria meant that they dropped 13 cohesion points to minus 14 to minus well minus 13 for most of them for one of them it was minus 16 oh okay yeah now that created a bit of a pickle for me because that means when they arrived at gates of alexandria they were able to continue to expand their cpa to go even further however when you run into combat i've also just realized sorry uh they were on minus 13 and the way things worked out would have been no difference but they should have moved to be minus 18 because they were involved in combat uh yes actually come to think of it they did engage so they were even less they aren't even worth morale which it makes sense because they've went all this way

and they've shown up at the gates and the barrage goes off from your men i've decided not to barrage it wasn't really worthwhile and you barrage me and upon being barraged my men decided um or rather the morale adjustment table decided this isn't worth it let's not do this let's surrender on mass instantly and let the fight be over so that's what the saharan detachment did they made all the way to alexandria to surrender after taking out three airfields worth of sgsus capturing another three airfields along the way six allied airfields i now have along that road but that unfortunately is where they decided that's enough so they surrendered which means that the group that dropped the two infantry behind in the qataran depression have now

surrendered at the gates of alexandria handing over their gun their trucks and most importantly and esoterically the camels the camels and they're just they're not war camels anymore they're just city camels they're prisoner of war camels so the camel saga ends not with a bang but with a confusing whimper because the camels have now been taken into alexandria and i fear we will no longer find out what happens to them they've been abstracted from the game of the game yeah they aren't living camels they aren't dead camels they're captured camels well i've just sunk into the population of camels they're not distinguished anymore well what they are technically i guess are prisoner points yes which just immediately go from alexandria so i get some

free victory points and the good thing is because they are prisoners and you are in alexandria that's where you've got them alexandria has unlimited resources which means the camels unless i take alexandria will never die no they're being shipped to european prisoner of war you you can't because when i get my prisoners for alexandria they get shipped out of the map and become points oh fuck what I thought it was Cairo it might

oh it might be Cairo they might have to do a little train journey no do not put do not put the camels on the train don't send them to Cairo don't send them overseas don't export the camels please just a bunch of

Italian and German guys next to some camels in a prisoner of war camp in France well the camels the Saharan detachment their journey has ended yeah what I found especially funny about this was

picturing the conversation between the commander of the detachment to the two battalions of infantry that are getting left behind like just steady on boys you'll come and get us and then they're like I will

immediately are like i will surrender to waverly himself and no one else they're driving along the road they take out these sgsus their conscience sits heavy on them and for a moment they think they can push through it they think they can move past this moral obstacle that's been in their way along this road and then they arrive at the gate of alexandria all it takes is a barrage to pin one of their groups and for some reason it brings about a moral reckoning that they just simply can't get past. So instead they drop their weapons, they surrender their camels

and they decide it's time to be sent back to Europe and that is where our adventure will end. They wanted to get back. And with it what's interesting is the Saharan detachment I'm not sure who made up the Saharan detachment

but it is interesting that now the Saharan detachment is going to Europe. I'll do some research into it but it would be interesting if that was a local a locally sourced division using like Libyans who are used to the desert

to make that force and now they're just in Europe the crazy thing is that unit had incredible defensive ratings for combat oh right they had 7 for their defensive rating what? yeah

how many toe? like 5 jeez so you could have just plonked them somewhere and they would never have yeah they would have been completely fine in a defensive position but I flew too close to the sun I flew too close to Alexandria

and now the camels are water bound and they're off to France let's hope they don't get sunk I would make sure that our aircraft do not go after these transport planes or these transport ships

that's not going to happen just hitler and mussolini communicating let this convoy through it's got the camels on it the camels are the secret weapon because no one understands what they are what they can do maybe it'll do more damage in europe possibly i i would like to um maybe proposition um that the campaign for north africa has an expansion pack which is the europe camel adventure which is a game of life but for camels pasco collect 200 it's a more desert themed version of the film warhorse who war camel i'd watch that sea biscuit they're gonna be they're gonna be over the sea yeah but you do also you had the black shirts rumbling they're gonna get to to brook next

which is gonna have an impact just they're sort of in my head they've been approaching yes once they hit to brook they're like something they're like another variable to consider they're real they're gonna go from an impending thing to like i know i actually have to think about these guys as well well they're going to play a vital role because after my saharan detachment surrendered i did highlight some of the things that are still on the map i was posturing peacocking and showing what it is that I have still up my sleeve. And what I have up my sleeve is twofold.

First, I have the two battalions that dropped off from the Saharan detachment. They're still in the Depression. And that is both figurative and geographical. It's rare that lines up so well. Anyway,

it's a step beyond. It's a dramatic irony where the weather matches the mood. Pathetic fallacy. Yeah. so the the thing is those guys are there they have a single water truck and they have fuel in their tanks but what they can do is make a push and yes the trucks may break down yes they may have to go on foot for the rest of the journey afterwards but they are still much further east than any of my men have ever got apart from of course the former detachment so yeah but you don't

know at what point along the north road they became traitors and deserters i think it was as soon as that first barrage went off oh so they they were loyal up to the reach of the city they were loyal up until the first bit of pushback they received the moment they came under fire for the very first time they surrendered instantly which i think makes them some of the worst trade as imaginable what they've essentially done is marched across three tiles so probably one and a half thousand kilometers of desert to surrender yeah and they the thing is they went from siwa to alexandria they went to the wind conditions yeah and they surrendered they also mirrored the journey of alexander the great significantly less

it wasn't visiting a prophet to sort of change history it was surrendering but they were traveling that route yeah it's just alexander the morally gray but that means they can still push these two battalions they can still drive further out maybe they'll go back to the airfields maybe they'll try and take some of your trucks maybe they'll have a bite of the cherry maybe they'll go for alexandria maybe they won't surrender maybe they were the best of us all along them being there though is an issue for me because that road's in striking distance

so I do need to be careful with I can't just have convoys go like as far as possible and just end up on that road anymore from like stronghold to stronghold because if I push them yes they'll be taking huge cohesion hits but you don't need cohesion

to do trucks yeah I can just I can wander into the trucks and then mine yeah so I can do that I can take your trucks and as well as that I also have as you mentioned the other black shirt divisions two more black shirt divisions that have arrived now these black shirt divisions are currently moving across map b they're up along the north of map b and next turn they can reach map c they can reach to brook so what i outlined to you is something that i found quite interesting about my planes my sm81 specifically is that they can

carry out transport missions i have sm-81s somewhere in map b yeah and they're good at it because mine you said they like can do two and a half two points was it that's what it shows on the transport mission bit mine cap out of one i think so i've got i've got two and a half big big old planes which means that what i can do is break off some of my infantry from the black shirts have them go to this particular airfield and then fly them over to what is now an allied airfield for me right next to Alexandria

it does mean because of the distance I can't actually fly them there and have them fly back they're just shy by 10 or so hexes so it means if I fly them there it's a one-way trip for these planes I guess it would be anyway because they don't have SJSUs at the around for

well that if it's a transport mission they can drop them off there and then they loop back around. Oh, yeah, it's the same thing, so they don't need an SJSU. So they can fly there, they can drop them off, and then they can fly back. But if I don't have SJSUs there and I need to do the full extension, they arrive at an allied airfield,

which those ones that I've marched over technically are, but then they have to stay there because I have no friendly SJSUs there. And if you get SJSUs there, you've won. Exactly. You've got rid of them for the rest of the scenario. But the problem is these SM-81s are very good bombers Oh okay So I will be losing very good bombers

For the sake of transporting these guys But it is It is matching what's sort of been occurring In the game so far I've noticed Which is We've had one battle on the front Which was this upstage The fight with the wall

Everything else has been people just darting Behind enemy lines And when it comes to that wall is not two like walls next to each other at all. And that wall only had one clash and then I pulled everyone else back I made sure that that didn't become a protracted

fight that I couldn't really sustain so instead I thought maybe I can distract you, if I go for Alexandria you have to go back and you have to do something about that and that's where the black shirts come in because if I fly a transport mission there I can get about 12 toe points of men there. Which is nasty

and those 12 toe points some of them have a higher attack rating than just one some of them are 3, 4, 5 they're your elites aren't they the black shirts sort of on paper in terms of their capability some of them are

very reasonably considered the elite so if I get them there, if I fly them over to the gates of Alexandria that becomes a very realistically winnable fight because they will not be suffering from the massive cohesion hits

of travelling long distance there is an issue they will have though I'll point out they have to win decisively their first fight because they won't be able to take ammo with them they have to they have the ammo that they came with

and that's it what you can also fly with transport missions are motorbikes recon units however I had a look through there's no sign of those no sign of motorbikes within these groups so it would mean that when they arrive it is very much do or die so i will be breaking off parts of this black shirt division some of

their elite troops as well you are going to go for it do you think i reckon i am because if i get them there to alexandria and i take alexandria with these guys all i need to do is keep a bit of muster going on there and it will cause trouble for you for the rest of the rest of my supply that's where my supplies arrive and originate from so if you control that i could use what's in is what's in most of a troop what's in a handful of airfields and then what's in the unit's first line trucks yes i cut your supplies off from the wall it means that my wall can then either push and just follow your guys behind if they march back to alexandria to help out or if they stay there then i can then go for the long protracted fight because i'm closer to

my supplies than you ever will be which means at that point you either have to try and push through the wall which means you're going up against a two to one division fight or you retreat you give up ground and then that's also a win and if that means using up a black shirt divisions elite troops which i didn't have up until this point in the game then that's a risk i'm willing it's sort of what you want your elite troops to be doing is you're using them as like commando special forces rather than just bare infantry. Exactly. I'm bringing

them in behind enemy lines, putting them right at the doorstep of Alexandria. And if I can take that, if I can hold it for even a couple of op stages, which this isn't even factoring in the transport time for you to get there, this is just the actual fight

itself. If I manage to hold out long enough there with unlimited resources that Alexandria brings, then that's going to cause havoc for you. I've got some stuff to move up to Alexandria from Cairo I've seen there's a division there maybe two?

One will stay in Cairo the other, I haven't done it with the tiles yet but if you remember in the organisation phase I split it into train sized pipes Well that's another thing, your train is currently cut off

because your train only goes as far west Not at the minute because they're not there It's the last point that I touched I don't exactly know how you rebalance that I'll have to have a look at It would make sense if they're there They're stopping the train Because then what would I have to touch

To turn the train Back on Yeah that's a good point because you've got men further Because I've got men on the train tracks Oh you've got men on the tracks So in that case in that case no i'm not cutting it off any further yeah but you pointed out a flaw in my plan not necessarily a flaw just a hiccup which is that in the old truck convoy phase you can have your

trucks roll back through these airfields and reclaim them as yours yeah and they'll just do that because they're on the road one thing i do need to check is whether or not any unit can reclaim an airfield or if it has to be a combat unit but even if it is that the trucks can i just need to push these saharan battalions that have been left behind back into these airfields and have them just stay there just have them sit in one of the airfields ready for the black shirts to arrive as reinforcements and then from there it's it's a fight because you could take rather than threatening alexandria i don't know i'm giving you ideas uh you could take one of the airfields that's close to mersima true that would be in you going back and forth transport missions

and essentially over the course of a couple of op stages force me to go and get them or you just keep flying the infantry in and like you'd leave the tanks and guns behind but you could have two or three op stages of

transport. And I did consider that but the benefit of Alexandria is one cutting off your supplies at the source It's such a big target to take yeah and it's also so far away from the wall that if you're splitting your wall it's a massive journey if you're marching them all back it's a borderline victory and i take map d almost in its entirety i wouldn't march them back i will say i've not

checked them for a while to see how good they are but the guys in um the division in cairo is the sixth australians uh who i don't know if you remember from the operation compass were the other division oh i i the reason that i'm not too concerned about that is because if you do that then i just go to cairo next that's got a division in it i would have a division in each oh well your division showing up to alexandria uh the issue they would have is i'm pretty sure alexandria is fortified isn't it yep which means if i managed to get in there and hold it that's gonna at least help me hold off a little while it's certainly i'm in a precarious position where these deep lunges could

really... Oh yeah, and at that point if all you've got is one division in both Cairo and Alexandria I think there's ways that I can manipulate that situation towards a victory. Oh, for sure, yeah. Because Cairo's so off in the middle of nowhere

compared to the rest of the map. They're an op stage away from each other. Yeah, I think it's just when I if I break past that line it's so difficult to get to cairo other than through alexandria so if i managed to get into that little wedge between the two and have a force holding there all i need to do really is then just start bolstering that wedge yeah and there's other airfields that you've got between there yes so if i managed to get one

or two of those then those transport missions become a whole different kettle of fish looks like the fighting's gonna abruptly move to map e well that's what i'm hoping that is good for you The Saharan detachment have opened up the door for something scary. You also, in this scenario, have, because you went past El Alamein, I think you got closer to Alexandria than Rommel or the Italians ever did. Just in a very unconventional way. So all in all, today was a massive victory in my head, even though my guy showed up and surrendered.

It was like a proof of concept. Yes. And it also, because my plan was going to be just hold alexandria with the saharan detachment for a while and keep you split and attention drawn but now after the whole surrender situation i've looked at the air missions and how i can use that instead you know what would be bad is if you send them and they get intercepted by fighters and then you lose like 10 tow points of infantry without them that would be bad however with me taking out two of your airfields you didn't take out any fighters i will say that well either way i've

taken out some of your airfields and your other airfield is just behind alexandria if i find a way to get over there yeah then that's going to be bad for you and they're not down because we had a limited you could have less than you need and it was alexandria is an airfield in and of itself yes you just haven't put the tiles down because you don't get enough in the box and it feels redundant uh yes they are they are also airfields just so you're aware but what i can do is um i can't stop moving my planes and sgsus because i've got sgsus that have been backed up from when you took out some of my other ones at fort madelena do they come in through tripletania I need to check where they come from

because with those SGSUs, if I get them to Fort Madelena and I move my bombers to Fort Madelena I can bomb Cairo and Alexandria with ease so if I start taking out your airfields there, then there's no fighter

opposition I need to worry about yeah that doesn't work so I'm pretty confident that this gambit might have actually paid dividends worried to see how it'll play out this is not how i thought things would look after last play session because when you push the wall back i was worried that i just overextended that because of my

dwindling supplies i was completely fucked but now i've realized i don't have to play war conventionally and i wouldn't have thought this if you hadn't done this truck bandit bullshit I mean yeah You opened my eyes Andy That's fine I think Currently it's still earned me more than it's lost me It might cost you everything It might but currently I've taken out

Like 5 or 6 airfields Worth of SJSUs Yeah which is pretty nice And 5 or 6 convoys of trucks Thankfully those convoys are Smaller I haven't grabbed a sort of mother load convoy I didn't have a mother load convoy

Which is why if i had done my convoys properly then you probably would have if you'd done your convoys properly you might have lost by now i think i i guess it's one of those like domino effect things where if i did the convoys properly then i would have been able to make a much more conceded march towards the east yeah and i wouldn't need to worry too much about this situation it is making me nervous for the proper game because we're gonna have learned oh it's made me so confident for the full game oh really in terms of well that's the thing it's made me confident that the first six turns of the full game i really feel like i'm gonna end up in

alexandria oh wow okay i think because if you do that we you've won i think i need to hold it for a certain amount of time you need to have the supply lines but if you take alexandria and six turns in the main game it's not gonna last 10 it's gonna be very quick i'm confident i will take alexandria or at least mercy mature in three turns in the full game oh shit that's scary because i was looking at something today when we were playing yeah and i genuinely think there's a real shock and all plan that i can drop on you that is too overwhelming for you to be able to maneuver around yeah because i do have that concern as well because what fucked the italians up was it was an equipment issue but it was primarily their commanders being pussies and

what helped the allies initially was their commanders being great despite them being under strength which what that means is i think i've said this before it's down to commander versus commander and i don't have that gap on you yes because you're in like what fucked the italians up was the things you're in control of what allowed the uh allies to be successful was the things i'm in control of yes so between those two i'm in a quite a risky position and the the unique place we're in is we've talked a lot about have other people played this game if someone has, maybe someone's finished

this game before. I'm sort of getting to a point where I think it probably has because it it's had enough time and as we're breaking it down and getting into it it is playable enough that I think I wouldn't be

shocked if there were like gaming groups from the sort of 80s 90s especially before the internet yes you probably did do a run through however what is fairly unique i think is even if people have played this game before how many people have done the first six turns twice yeah that'll be because i think going into this it's such a unique position to have played the first six turns and then redo the first six turns with the rest of the game in the in the front of mind on the horizon so i think when we go into this full game on the back of what we've done in the scenario all of these weird tactics we've tried

out all these odd maneuvers i think when we start applying those to the full game it's going to lead to a really wacky and pretty intense first six turns and then i think after that when the dust settles we're going to be playing a very different game than people would if they just played the campaign for North Africa turn 1 to 1.11 yes I would agree

also be interested if we do get a really quick win I know I've joked about it in reference to like the 111 turns but like if you do get a decisive win in the first like 10 turns say

to the point where we talked about if someone wins we won't do the whole we'll keep going but if you've captured Alexandria in 10 turns there's no point it would at that point I think be interesting to flip it

and have me play the Axis you play the Allies and see if, oh is this game fundamentally broken from a fairly early point yeah if if that were to happen and i i think you're mentioning that now and the way that i'm thinking my confidence there is i don't think misplaced so if i were to win in less than 10 turns i say we don't do the full 111 to see what kind of

entropic state the game gets to i think yes at that point we go back to the drawing board and we start a game and then play it and then i guess if i would then lose it from there i'm just too bad at the game to play versus you as it were but if i'm then as the axes storm in again in 10 turns then maybe it's like the initial starting scenario might be fucked and then maybe we do the thing where we pick up the desert fox scenario or the llma and play from is it a more balanced starting place for what it gives you at turn 30 for instance yeah that's a keep playing i think and like explore yeah that's a scary thought though isn't it yeah like now that i'm thinking about it that is a realistic possibility because just the way this is panned out there like i'm

just thinking about what i've got planned for the next few op stages in terms of how i can infiltrate those areas yeah and if you don't have a bunch of divisions there to garrison alexandria and cairo and mersa matruh yeah then there is definitely a world where i can just get guys in bomb the saharan division along that road get to an airfield drop people in the airfield control alexandria or cairo and then win the game in realistically like two three turns which feels nuts but it would be i guess at that point we also we might play another scenario we might go oh the air transport rules are busted because because i think maybe a risk is richard berg seems to have been obsessed with recreating yes what was

and it might be a thing of like oh with all these things that are incredibly accurately researched and then as we play it out what we realize is the italians if they had better leadership could have stormed the suez and changed the fate of the world it's just cause and i would enjoy this conclusion because graziani is a craven loser that italy we're not speaking italian right now yeah because it's sort of like the um you know sully yes it's have you seen the film when are you thinking about the bits with the birds where it's like no they immediately turn yes but and then it's like no human would do that yeah if you run the simulation playing it back again in the simulation you have more context yes so in that um whoever may not have seen it so that was the

um it was the guy who landed on the hudson after his uh birds hit his engines yeah there's a bird strike in the engines and the plane was like the engines i think shut off completely so they the pilots decided after a few moments of thinking that they were going to have to land on the hudson because of how far they'd be able to get before the altitude dropped too much and afterwards there was a whole sort of like a hearing, like a tribunal

about, well, no, you could have got to an airport and they put like hundreds of pilots through simulations to like Yeah, and the simulation was always the second the bird strike hits start banking off towards an airport Because I'm not sure I think it's like a, I've not played Microsoft

Flight Simulator, but I think it's like a scenario it must be like they must have that included one of the things like try this out and it's because it's doable if you make a split second impossible decision to be like right all my engines are out i need to immediately bank like yeah it's the equivalent of save scumming in a game yes it's like a good description you know exactly what's going to happen you know exactly how to get around the scenario you're safe scumming so you can get through this encounter that you realistically can't the first time around if you go into this blind you're gonna go the way that the italians did but if you redo the scenario knowing all of

the rules of the game fairly in depth and the rules of the game are complicated but if you just manipulate the rules with certain aspects of it being pushed to the forefront and you have a perfect string kind of like a speed runner or someone who exploits all these glitches why i stopped playing a lot of games on harder difficulties because i felt like at least for me personally i started playing the ai and the systems rather than just playing the game if that makes sense like especially with a lot of grand strategy games and like civilization or total war for instance at a certain point on the like higher difficulties you win by knowing how the ai and the game reacts yes not being a better commander yeah um i think it possibly

might have a situation where like that where it's like oh if you know how these things interact yeah and i think that's what i've started to realize about this game is that the the the fact that the rules are so vast there's so many pockets of the rules you can delve into and exploit things that the other person won't be thinking of. And that would be harder to do if you had the teams of five on either side. But neither of us is always going to have every

four set of the rules at the forefront of our minds. Yeah. Reserve rules, all of the ways you can use aircraft. Like production rules. Construction, minefields,

using fortifications building fortifications we've not done any minefields yet no i nearly did but it was too costly but you know there's a region in libya called the devil's garden no because the during world war ii between the germans and the allies they laid something like 16 million mines across the egyptian and libyan border and it's like a ongoing humanitarian because they're there yeah it's like an ongoing road like humanitarian crisis you never hear about where it's like that entire region is just fucking full of mines that's scary like 60 million mines in what is a three-year conflict

like how many are they putting down like a day like they have like tanks with flails on the front of chains to trigger mines like they have specific tank variants to go through minefields and stuff it's like a big part of what's actually going on in the war itself that we just haven't touched yeah it's made me realize that today being able to turn the game on a dime like that being able to go from you push my wall back and now all of a sudden i'm at alexandria and if that rule for the morale adjustment had went differently. I could have pushed your men out of Alexandria. Could have.

If you'd rolled low, you would have had a morale adjustment, but you had the bigger force that cancels out, and then it's force versus force, and because you have the bigger force, you'll likely have the better outcome. So you could have taken Alexandria today. This could have

been a very different and much saltier podcast from my end if it had gone that way. Because if I held that, and then I did because at that point i'd like to give myself the credit that even without the panic of them surrendering i might have figured out the air plan and then dropped in reinforcements and then i could have continued to do that and at that point if i've got another 12 tow and i'm there in a reinforced area and the saharans have incredible defensive ratings it means that when i'm in there

it becomes a very unshakable force unless a division rocks up and even then you're not going to get rid of them necessarily in one go there's also i don't know how the supply line stuff works but because that is a supply point that might be a zero hex supply route i have to trace it back to some i have to trace it back to the brook so i wouldn't have won because i was also going to say if you're doing supplying by air like no one in their right mind would call the like cold war berlin airlift not a supply line yes it just didn't use trucks all i would need to do at that point is have something run through the middle of the desert that fort madelena supply dump yeah if i use that and then string that along with the saharan battalions that are still there

yeah they can build a supply dump because it's borderline free and that road up to mercer matruh is less than 30 CPA on the road, so you can do a lot. And then when my black shirts show up with their huge array of trucks, I just split them up into convoys, partition them along that road,

and then within a turn, I win the game. I might need to break the map out for the next session and have a real think, or we're not gonna. Because that could be the end of the game. Yeah. All I would need to do realistically is have a few convoys on reserve in the mid-desert section of the map and then when i take one of the cities i then just splinter

them out and then all of a sudden if they're within reaching distance of 30 cpa of each other i win all in all a scary situation that the game could be won or lost in the first few turns it's very concerning i'm now uh i've had a google doc with like notes from the scenario of like this was a mistake you should have put these guys here this has been a weak point now that maybe needs a

re-evaluation I'm gonna, in the hiatus between the scenario and the full game, I'm gonna come up with a very clear strategy oh you're gonna have I'm gonna have an actual battle plan something the Italians didn't have other than go fucking get involved

which is kind of what I've been doing so far and it's been go get involved tentatively. Yeah. Oh, this is, I think today has been for me the most important play session that we've ever had. Seems like it's been a real strategic eye-opener for you. It really has been. Where it's like sort of laid a lot of the game bare.

It has because I've now realized if I took that risky move, but then it opened up like two or three other risky moves I can make and that branches out to all sorts of other plans and tactics that can involve all sorts of other forces of the game. If my air force was at full capacity now, it would be a completely different situation.

If I had all of my divisions fully supplied, if I had all of my, well, not all of, but some of my divisions fully motorized, all of this could be devastating for you if I planned a little bit ahead. Yeah. And I can do that in the full game. Yeah.

I've got some tricks I haven't tried in this scenario, but they're tricks, not strategies. I need a strategy. Yes. That's it. I've been trying tricks, but when it comes to the full game, those tricks will become a plan.

They're like tactics within this overall strategy, not just like, does this work or does it not? There's some scary stuff coming, Andy. Yeah. Well, we've chatted at length today about this game. Well, I guess they had a bit of a shorter one for Christmas, and, I guess, a sort of check-in on how we're feeling about the game.

We've been excitedly talking about it because we've had, like, a two-week break. Yeah, a few weeks ago, I was questioning the reality of what we're doing here. I was wondering whether or not this is ever going to end, and today we've spun it back round again. The pendulum has swung the other direction where we're looking at the full game possibly ending

before the scenario would end. I don't yeah fuck I need to think of some stuff but yes it's not necessarily super likely that could happen but the very fact it could happen has changed my mindset on it

well it's also going to have changed mine in that I need to be much more defensive which is the opposite of what it felt like I should be doing which was using the like limited stuff I have to be aggressive so it's going to be a very different

set of opening turns for me for sure, regardless. If I go hard enough, we were told this by the Echoes of War guys we had on episode 3, if the Italians were to push hard from go when they have the numbers and they have the air superiority,

then it's a nigh-on perfect win. It's also something that's unfortunately backed up by the history stuff. Yeah, everything you've said, you've just been coaching me to destroy you. and it's finally paying off right uh fans the rest of the history segments you're gonna hear until the game starts are just lies to put him in a headspace i can use right andy one i can hear

you now two i edit the episodes i'll hear that i'm gonna cut that out as well awesome what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna use some sort of ai voice changer and i'm gonna you know i'm just gonna make you look really bad from now on it's a different strategy in the game i've got a strategy and out of game I'm going to make you look like a really bad guy. Yeah, because I don't listen to the pod because I can't because something about my own me talking is just unsettles

me. So you could be sending me any file to upload. They're just blank files. There's no one listening to this. That's concerning because it means you're writing a lot of emails with interesting stuff you've never said you knew.

I just stick it in chat GPT. It pulls it from the internet. it pulls it from the internet yeah it's all bullshit there's no listener we said this from the start you really think people are listening to this I guess speaking of no listener

shall we read some of the emails you've come up with yourself yeah I'm quite proud of some of these ones I've sent us over some good ones so this first one I think you sent under the pseudonym Largo yeah that's the one I sent over here and it's a good one I'm proud of it

so it's And also, just the subject of it does not really help my case here because the subject is another war with a mate, fam. You've really got lazy. It's the ChatGPT model I have. I didn't pay for premium this month. So it opens. Hi, guys.

I've been listening to your podcast for about a month and a half, and I'm pleased to say I finally caught up on episode 54. That is commitment, by the way, because that's an episode a day. That's a... Well, I hope you enjoyed it. Yeah, I bloody well hope so. it's a weird feeling now having to wait for new episodes each week but i look forward to seeing what happens next admittedly i came close to giving up on your podcast after listening to

about a dozen episodes i did enjoy your banter enough to stick around for that long but i was interested in hearing about the game too and was getting disheartened as you freely admitted the early days distinct lack of discussion on the very thing that your podcast was ostensibly about well i've got good news today largo uh we've talked about the game at length if anything this is a perfect email for today and uh i would say i'd love people to recommend the podcast to their friends but it is a thing of do i tell them to start at 15 yeah will they get through the nonsense will they enjoy the nonsense is it like watching the u.s office where it's like well skip the first season and just start

from season two i would say it measure it on your on your friends if they like a bit of bit of whimsy and the first the thing is those first 12 or so episodes it very much sets the scene for our mentality going into it I think it's important to listen to it's nothing we're doing is important it's important to listen to that because

it does set the scene for how we decided to play the game and the way we went about it so I think if you want to understand the mentality of how we went into it it's important and it's a bit of whimsy and wackadoodle fun but maybe some people go back to it once they're

they're fine with us yeah once you know that you're okay with us as people then you can listen to if you like common ground listen to those ones if you don't then it's probably best to just start from episode 13 but you go on i'm glad i stuck around though as it was around then that you started talking more about the game and actually playing it and since then i feel like you've really hit your stride and found a great balance between discussing the game having historical context and still having plenty of fun and silly bandit i'm in for the long haul now and i look forward to spending the next 10 plus years listening now i'm caught up i have a few questions for you number one while playing the scenario do you suppose you might play a bit loose with some

of the rules for the sake of getting a better understanding of game mechanics to give one example if you get to turn six and haven't had a sandstorm yet you might opt to forgo the weather rule and simply declare that a sandstorm occurs so you can both see how that affects the game I don't think we'd do that I think in that case that specific example it would be a nice the sandstorm is a surprise that we're going to encounter

we have been a bit loose with the rules I think in terms of like we're not doing we're not doing the equivalent of the you've put your hand on the piece in chess you have to move it we've had like oh this

it's still your movement phase but this guy didn't end within two of someone else you just didn't think to move like we've been a little bit looser on that stuff well we had that today i declared all my movement i we'd resolved one of the combats and then i realized i hadn't moved the black shirts from the ones who came from tripoli the second and third i hadn't moved them and we looked over that and i went well can i moved them you were fine with that so i moved them along further along the map b so in the actual game that would be closed off by that sequence of movement yeah when it comes to that once you've moved all of your guys once you've declared that movement once a combat is resolved you wouldn't

then be able to move someone so in that sense we've been more forgiving with omissions and mistakes and i think we've also been a bit looser with from the information side like you've shared when your guys are hungry yes we've discussed like we've been much more candid yeah about our forces i'm gonna barrage you here but it is a big ammo investment like letting the other person know yeah i mean that kind of stuff as we go i've just talked at length there about how i'm planning to drop guys in from my black shirts next to alexandria come the main game i will not be so candid with that because it will completely fuck my strategy yeah but part of that is the understanding of how the structure works so i think what the question is also so we can

both look at the rules on moves we're making as part of why we're being so it's not like one person being like i want to do this i'm going to look at the rules but i don't want to ask the other person the rules yes to give away my strategy yes it's more about getting an understanding of the game and the question seems to be around would we fudge the rules so that we get a chance to experience everything and in that regard i think on my side anyway i think the consensus is no no i don't think we've fudged the rules i don't think we have any plans to to fudge the rules to experience every faucet of the game I think if you'd asked in turn one

I might have been like yeah we might do that but I think now part of it is the scenario has been a big it's been a year at a certain point it's like this year I'd like it to like have a feeling that it mattered

beyond just us understanding the rules I'm invested now when we started I didn't care who won the scenario yeah me too it was like a fun sense like i want to win like to win the scenario to what is yeah you spend a year on something it's like you'd like the result to matter and be favorable to you and also it's like i do feel like there will be a sense of momentum yes like whichever one of us um whichever one of us does win the scenario i feel like we'll have a bit of a

a bit of aura a bit of momentum going into the main game and i i want that yeah i think that's it it's early on yes i think we would have been more open to it now that we've got so far in and it feels like we've invested the time the effort i think fudging it to understand the rules more is i think the the opportunity we have to explore the rules is going to be as realistic as it will be in the full game because not everything is going to come up very frequently in the full game there might be realistically there might be parts of the game we don't employ more than once in the full game itself and that's very possible actually yeah there's also stuff that in this scenario just hasn't come up like for instance the commonwealth production has a two-month lag yes which is eight

turns this scenario six so i haven't even haven't even thought about it haven't even really looked at it since we were doing the rules yes we'll definitely look at it in the gap between the scenario and the main game i don't think there's a point fudging to like do a sandstorm for instance if we're not fudging to do commonwealth production which we're not because it's we don't understand the game well enough to do that fudge yeah that's it if we fudge it we don't understand the consequences of doing that yeah so while it would be perfect ideal blue sky thinking that we could try out every single aspect of the game that would be great but i think realistically if we were to start doing that during the scenario especially if the example here being in turn six

we decide we're going to employ a sandstorm just to test it out i feel like it's so many variables laid on that it becomes a bit of a mess and i think we'd become a little bit flustered we'd have to almost do that every op stage with a different rule for it to not have a massive impact but even then it becomes every op stage is a sort of like fun house whack job experience of what the game might be yeah so i think there's a lot of risk to that so i think for that reason we're not going to and the fact we want to see how the scenario plays out but yes it will come at a cost we won't have an idea of everything but it's also a question we'll have to just considering yeah off mic yeah but we we just have to we just have to swallow that to an extent

but it's a really good question it does raise some thought about what this scenario is actually going to provide us in terms of experience but you go on similar to the previous question how much would both of you say you're focused on winning the scenario as opposed to trying out a variety of different tactics to try and get a rough idea of what works and what doesn't going into the full game again perfectly timed question one because we've just answered that answering it but yes i think yeah we are now invested in winning the game and when it comes to trying out new tactics uh today is perfect for that i've tried a new tactic it paid dividends yes i surrendered my group inadvertently but i've opened up a door to new opportunities so which is what

the scenario is for because you probably don't want to surrender big surrender a big block of guys that's in the main game but you surrendering them here is probably worth it because of the options that's opened up in your head yes i don't want to go too wacky with my ideas but i am confident that i can try some experimental things and i'm not going to lose 10 years doing it because i was thinking about just not using the commonwealth navy at all in the scenario what's the what was your thought process for that that it would be new to you oh so catch me off guard with it but then i was thinking about it and i was like if i'm deploying i want to know how it works that's probably more valuable than catching me

off guard yeah because you can you'd read the rules as well i'm sure before i started using them to a certain extent you you had an awareness of them i knew there'd be a problem and now i know what the scale of that problem is but regardless i knew it was an obstacle i'd have to face yeah so it does give me a head start and then i know what i'm looking at now but it also gives you the head start of knowing how to employ that and how valuable they are like what those deployable barrage points contribute yeah i think more useful than having kept yeah you've got a better situation now i would say by using that rather than just abstracting it completely so another another very good question though really really positions us in a a good position to i don't know

what i'm saying there i'm just in position a lot i'm trying to get back to the point of the email how is that you've mentioned that there's actually a decent amount of deception and subterfuge in the game would you ever consider adding a segment to the podcast where each of you has a moment alone to talk about moves or general ideas that you're planning but don't want to reveal to the other i imagine it would be tricky to implement considering james presumably wouldn't be able to edit andy's portion of the segment but it'll be fun to get a preview of what we might be able to expect in the coming turns and get a better look at your different approaches to the various situations you find yourselves in well we talked about this uh not yesterday last week in the

christmas festive episode the war with a mate christmas extravaganza um what we do have in mind for that because that is something we want to introduce but it is going to be a delicate one of balance we've looked at a a bit of a side project a the idea next year is that alongside the game we'll be doing these usual episodes just with a lot more in-depth um explanation behind it we'll be able to share some of the the spreadsheets the documentation in a format that makes sense and is reliable but we'll also be looking at releasing a patreon which will have further in-depth analysis of the game because part of that is um finding the time to do so requires us being able to open up resource for ourselves it's it's going to be a lot more time

consuming than we thought going into it so we want to be able to find a balance where we can afford to spend that time also the logistical thing of like we don't want to be sending episodes back and forth where it's like all right you edit most of it and then send it to me and i'll put my bit in now you don't listen to 35 to 42 minutes and edit your bit we don't want to clog the feed it feels like that's probably the the way to handle something like that where it's it's bonus but yeah so we're looking at putting that out as a sort of bonus perspective which would be available so that people can if they're that invested in what we're going to be doing behind the scenes what i thought processes are that will be something additional that people can tap into

if they're so inclined so that's how we would do that that way it can be fairly brief each week but look at a little segment where each of us can do that for the audience where the other person doesn't get to have a glimpse at that so it's it's definitely something we want to put out there we're just working out the logistics so come the full game we do have a plan for that and lastly the listener email segment has a telegraph noise and common ground has james's comically haphazard recorded introduction when does the history segment get its own regular intro theme well it's a coming in five to six minutes probably yeah listen out it's uh it could be the case that the year ends with a bit of a reward a bit of a treat so keep those ears peeled because it's a

massive portion of the the episodes and andy puts in the work i think it's only fair that there's some fanfare at the beginning it is a very haphazard one for common ground i remember i recorded that we would always do a mic test before we record and i've just started recording it here in front of andy and the what you can hear in the common ground intro is me sat here recording it and andy asking me what i'm doing and me telling him that i'm recording the common ground intro um that's that's where that came from but the the history one requires something i think a bit more tailored anyway really enjoying the podcast and i wish you both the best of luck with the heculean task you've taken on subtly humbly and bravely tom p.s a while back james mentioned that

he wanted there to be an avengers infinity war slash end game event for the subjects of the history segments that brought them all together and i felt the need to point out that there actually was a historical event that fits this criteria i believe it was called world war ii well tom you're not wrong um i yeah i think i made that comment when you were talking about when you dropped an end a post-credit scene about rommel yeah and um what i what i did say i don't know if it's maybe been conflated with that was common ground should definitely have a shared common ground universe where it all happens in the same the same universe everything is all happening simultaneously common ground of this yeah yeah it'd be a horrible nightmare i don't

think that was society we engineer between us if you're listening disney take us up on that please we could really do with that budget but thank you very much for emailing tom a lot of questions that very well timed so thank you for that yeah i i swear to god we don't plan the gameplay around the questions that are coming in it works perfectly sometimes that some of them are just so perfectly suited um but your questions were great there tom very insightful ones and for anyone who does want to send in any questions about the game any comments about what we're doing or anything at all really we vowed to read it all out you can reach us at info at warwithamate.co.uk our website warwithamate.co.uk has a web form and our instagram is just war

with a mate so anything you want to add to the conversation or if you just want to follow what we post each week on the instagram we always put a weekly post up and every now and then we'll pop some fun feed questionnaires and whatnot just little bits and pieces drips and drabs that's probably where we'll uh we'll update any side projects as well as we go on sort of most moment by moment one. Yes, that's our most social media presence that we have.

It's the only social media presence we have. We do have a Facebook page, but I've never updated it. We do also have a War of a Mate on YouTube. It's mainly just the weekly episodes, but we did put a video up of us unboxing the

game for the first time with us two and our Jurassic Park friend. Yes. just us opening it and reacting to it way before we knew how much we were getting ourselves into so uh yeah that was the day the game arrived on our doorstep it's us opening it up and looking through the rule books the tiles realizing what we were getting ourselves into it's it's um a fun look back at the the salad days back before we knew exactly how deep in we were getting so if you want to have a look at that that's that's on the youtube as well it's just war with a mate

that's the YouTube channel, easy to find but that is that is listener mail I believe that's, we've really extended this one so we'll not do a second mail just yet but we've got plenty in there, we will get to all of them we promise and thank you to everyone who

sent stuff in, it's always insightful stuff it's always thought provoking or at least a wacky anecdote and we love both and speaking of the new history segment intro here it is The men of the long range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to Cairo from a month's trip to Libya.

The contrast between the east and west of the Nile is very marked. In the east, the country echoes everywhere. At this point I gave little thought to my future, but had always been interested in boats and the sea. I am more or less in the position of a captain surprised where I had a telegram which is on the point of sinking because errors are present. We are absolutely not qualified to share views on history. Look at that. A history segment intro. Fit for a king.

And with the history segment intro, of course, comes the history segment, Andy. Yeah. Seven Farmer Division, part seven. The seventh history segment for the seventh. Is this the conclusion? Or is this just perfectly numbered? No, I didn't time it that well. Ah, cool.

This is pointless, then. Oh, thanks, man. As always, this is going to... Well, not always, but for most of the 7th Armoured Division series, we're starting with a Churchill quote, because, boy, did he love these guys. This guy had a real hard-on for them. Let me assure you, soldiers and airmen,

that your fellow countrymen regard your joint work with admiration and gratitude, that after the war, when a man is asked what he did, it will be quite sufficient for him to say, i marched and fought with the desert army and when history is written and all the facts are known our feats will gleam and glow and will be the source of song and story long after we who have gathered here have passed away wow this these soliloquies become more and more powerful every time he talks about he's a damn good speaker yeah he really was known for that yeah so the

seven for back in england um they've come back from italy they're living in the area uh around mumford uh and some fetford forest and swatham uh areas around norfolk and it's it's not great even though they're back in england the the huts they're living in aren't weatherproofed yes they're living in huts they're not weatherproofed and it's january in england in a particularly bad winter so it's not weatherproofed it's horrible and freezing yeah especially after the comparison to north africa it's far ends of the that must be a shock to the system oh yeah the homecoming for the norfolk yeomanry an infantry division as part of the seventh uh they'd been away for three years um although it was twinged it wasn't a triumphant

homecoming fully because a large amount of those who had left originally had been killed or captured and many of the norfolk yeomanry at this point aren't from norfolk they're just being filled in by whoever they can in north africa and italy so at this point the 11th facades um technically become detached from the 7th although they're going to spend most of their time with them and then reattach but montgomery had this idea that he would uh separate the armored card units out into being part of the headquarters uh but didn't have a huge effect but they do get new tanks at this point snazzy in fact they're the only division to get exclusively cromwell tanks and not what most armored divisions got which was a mixture of cromwells and shermans okay uh the

Cromwell is very reliable for a tank noticeably it has the advantage over the Sherman of not bursting into flames easily which the Sherman has a reputation for doing to the point where the allies nicknamed the Sherman the Ronson which is a reference to the slogan of Ronson lighters which is lights every time what a horrible way for a tank to be described oh yeah that reminds me of the rule doll cool that you dropped about the wasn't the gladiators yes there's never been a object more purposely built to catch fire the reputation it doesn't just for the allies uh the germans call sherman's tommy cookers oh dear so as well as not bursting into flames easily the Cromwell's also equipped with a 75mm or 6lb gun

and is also fast for a tank. After they take the limiters out, it can reach 50mph. Bloody hell. They also get new artillery. In fact, King George inspects the artillery units of the 7th at Sandringham, so they get a royal inspection. They get Sexton self-propelled guns for the 5th Royal Horse Artillery, 25 pounders for the third and uh both is for the 25th laa as well as they're also getting new

anti-tank guns the infantry get new armored trucks that can protect them from light weapon fire in general just upgrades across the unit everyone gets new equipment except the 11th hussars who receive staghound armored cars which are american so they do well in the desert but are too wide for narrow european roads a tradition that has carried on now to american car making so they set sail for normandy on the 5th of june 1944 one of the first units to arrive is on the 6th of june in the evening the 6th is d-day ah but they don't take part in the sort of private ryan saving private ryan beach yes i would imagine that wouldn't be a very easy environment for them to to navigate no they the beaches all get cleared and then they come in so yeah they're arriving on

a gold beach is the code name for it but it's around the city of khan's uh which is famous for film festival fame of course of course incidentally the khan film festival will be uh founded two years after this oh wow really 46 did not know it was that old yeah the terrain where they are is not good they've gone from the sort of rolling dunes which are well suited to tanks despite the maintenance things to just a maze of fields with high banks narrow lanes dense woodlands valleys visibility is typically limited to 50 yards just massive choke points for vision and transport just choke point choke point yeah give a sense of how bad this is at one point a british tank commander fights german interim infantry off the roof of his tank in hand-to-hand combat because

they jumped from the banks next to the road onto the top of the tank that's like how tightly quartered god that's horrible oh yeah so they take part in the battle of khan's uh which goes from d-day the 6th of june to the 6th of august it takes them a while here uh they're taking part in various operations here and around this time questions start to be raised about the division's capabilities uh largely for some issues on the 12th to the 13th of june in a village called villas bow cage where they don't perform particularly well uh so in early august major george erskine who had commanded the division since january and also the commander the brigadier commander william hind who's in charge of the 22nd armored brigade who are like

they're the armored fist in the armored division like if that makes sense they're like yes the tanks that they're the best tanks they've got yes the sort of the fist and amongst it yeah um they get relieved of duty as well as a hundred other officers in the division are removed from their positions and reassigned erskine's replaced by major general gerald lloyd vernier most of the divisions going into the normandy landings are fresh from training and eager they but the seventh have been at war continuously for three years it's like a different mindset they've got here and they've developed an old soldier's caution which personally i think is fair because anyone left here has gone through the campaign in north africa in italy what you have left here are the

cautious and the lucky to a certain extent i like that a lot the cautious and the lucky is a very good way to describe it lloyd verney lloyd verney even described as there is no doubt that familiar familiarity with war does not make one more courageous one becomes cunning and from cunning to cowardice is but a short step so some great quotes in this one oh yeah uh they even get described as d-day judges i've seen reference to which i don't they took wow they took part yeah that's an odd turn of phrase to be thrown around at them but the division is at a low point here there there's discipline issues there's guys who've been at war for a long long time they're just yeah general questions being raised despite this they're fighting hard just to give

you an example of it the one six queens and infantry which is made up of four companies at this time during the battle of khan's they get to a point where those four companies have respectively 8 15 40 and 55 men remaining in them across all ranks so that's 118 men remaining from the original 450 wow so that that number's dwindled massively that's a third yeah and one of them companies normally like 100 to 200 i think there's we're sitting around like 150 ish one of them's down to eight men fucking hell what kind of attrition is that is that from is that losses or losses captures the fighting around here is sort of skipping over a bit but it's very fierce in fact yeah the seventh when they land clash with an old foe of theirs rommel is in

charge of the area they land in oh so there's a real grudge match yeah they fight they're fighting the 15th panzer again who they fought in north africa oh christ i wonder how many instances there are of people who've actually fought each other in north africa are actually there within a few yards of each other battling again probably quite a lot yeah that's insane like yeah coming across an actual old foe yeah across a completely different continent yeah that's that's crazy yeah but after the battle of khan they do get their mojo back a bit they start fighting up towards the sen which is uh river sen which is 75 miles away uh at this point the terrain also opens up it goes from this like maze of tightly packed farms and valleys to more rolling hills

which are much better suited for tanks and interrupted by rivers but not deep enough to cause major problems so they're heading towards the seine through the champagne region the germans take huge losses at something called the falsade pocket uh it's where the germans in france basically collapse uh the seventh aren't directly involved in this but what this leads to is the germans sort of retreating at pace out of france this is the liberation of france so they're rolling through france now they're back on form they're fighting small engagements uh with germans taking prisoners not having a lot of uh issues being greeted by like grateful french locals they're sort they're in an upswing here so on the 25th of august uh the free french liberate paris

from german control france is basically back in allied hands and at this point they have something referred to as the great swan where it's only a great swan by the way if it's from the champagne region of france otherwise it's just a big sparkling bird yeah if this had been anywhere else big big sparkling bird but it's called the great swan because they cover hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days without any uh conflict so basically this is them traveling fairly fast for a handful of days and that is referred to as the great swan as in like you know swanning around yeah easy they're still traveling hundreds of kilometers in a matter of days it's but relative to what they're doing this is the great swan that's insane

that they're these are the operation compass guys i mean come on yeah so they're back in fighting shape they've had the commanders replaced at this point there's been some reorganization and important importantly they've sent a bunch of uh veterans who have been part of the division for five years at this point they get sent back to england which might seem like counterintuitive because they're losing their veteran core but they've been training the rest of them and these guys are the like bitter cynical like i'm not going down that lane because an anti-tank gun we'll be waiting around the corner guys right they've always got the guys who are too war weary they've given their expertise and now they're out of there yes they don't want to

get killed in this particular situation and the division needs to not have that they're gonna need them to like drive forward you need you need to have the risk takers in there not the people who are going to be overly cautious because of what they've seen already and those guys have they've earned a break i mean you fucking yes they have so we've got seven months of bitter fighting left to do through europe but we'll get to that next time and we'll leave the seventh on the border of holland and belgium ready to start driving further towards berlin ultimately um but yeah as i said we'll get to that next time wow a brief glimpse of the sort 7th after Normandy and in France

on the cusp of Berlin as well yeah very much heading towards the conclusion of not just their journey but the war itself yeah and it is a remarkable journey they've gone I can see why Churchill's

really into them and like what I've flown through here they fight 4 or 5 operations in the Battle of Cannes they fight a bunch of other stuff I've just sort of again you could write entire books which people have about the seventh so we're gonna have to i mean yeah you've read fly over some of it yeah well that's it when it comes to operation converse that was what two months uh that was a month that was 6th of january to the 6th of

february oh yes so in that operation alone that's already twice the amount of time that operation converse was and i can only imagine with the fighting you've described part of it are probably much more dense in france than operation compass was fighting in france like and the losses from what you've described are also much heavier they're really suffering you sort of lose the desert attrition on tanks yes but it's not europe sort of alternates between the worst place to be in a tank and like nice rolling ground sort of suited for tank combat well yeah the environment probably suited for tank combat but the nature of that means when the tank combat comes around that the tanks on both sides are in a position to fight each other yeah you don't need to worry as

much about the environment you're in a sort of white box scenario where you can just have that battle and it's going to be a decisive one yeah rather than worrying about how you're going to get to the fight it's just a case of you're in the fight how is that fight going to turn out but i'm picturing like 50 yards is like 100 meters right uh i think so yeah more but that visibility like you've been in like rural england right where it's oh yeah plenty yeah and it's like you just can't see anything the lanes it's just any corner you turn around any hedge could have a anti-tank gun or a panzer brigade behind it it's it just must be hell on your nerves yeah anywhere you go you could be walking into a life or death situation and the

warning you have for that is going to be seconds it's going to be your tank exploding yeah lights every time yeah it's scary that you think of these people who went from the desert to an environment that's so close to our own just a an environment that we're used to an environment we kind of live in yeah and that becomes the more dangerous environment in warfare because you don't have the environmental risks you just have the war yeah and the environmental risks on the hedge in the bleak rain aren't going to kill you, but they are hiding

the thing that is going to kill you. Yes, and that thing that's going to kill you is almost definitely going to, unless you kill it first. Oh, yeah. It's a case of you take them out first, or you get taken out. Yeah. So, that urban fighting seems like

a real nightmare. I would not want to be in urban warfare. I wouldn't want to be in any warfare. but i think urban warfare is particularly scary i've come to find a sort of calm solace in desert warfare through playing this game in the history segments but it's sort of what it does though it it's it's really disarming because it strips back the horrors of what it actually is hearing about these people who coped so well in north africa it it sets me up poorly and you know it becomes that's sort of my toxic trait is thinking that i could fight in a desert campaign oh my god no

but then again i i don't it's like i don't want to say but like all these guys were like shopkeepers yeah they were just people they were just everyday guys at some point yeah the most part anyway and we'll get into it when we start looking at some of the like victoria crosses and distinguished service medals of like individual guys doing stuff where it's like it almost feels like they're a different species but they're people from our country

it's not even it's not even geographically or really relative in time that distant yeah they just rise to the occasion they're great grandparents yeah some of them depend on

well not maybe grandparents i think that might be a bit too close but yeah great-grandparents you're looking at a few generations away people that we've met born in the not old enough to take part but who lived through the war as like children yeah i mean my my great-granddad who died um a few years ago was in the north african campaign and i've been looking into that recently actually because from what i understand he was possibly involved in one of the units that we've talked about a fair but i'm trying to figure out the actual history behind me a bit of if you can get the unit i can i'll look into it oh yeah i've been trying to the thing is what i have found out is

that he lied about his age to serve oh okay so he was i think 16 and lied about his age to to actually serve and i think um my understanding is he went under his his dad's name to serve oh so i think the recruiters are looking at it and like you're 45 you haven't you've got like a bum flush mustache but it's like we need people come on in yeah so because you didn't talk about it much and with them dead now you know i can't really get much info but i've been looking on all these ancestry websites and military record websites to try and find information but i don't really know which unit it was but i all i've got is some context from the family members so trying to find that out as well that'll be that'll be interesting i need to look up mine

as well because i know it's even my great grandfather my great great grandfather was in india okay so yeah not too far from the conflict as well yeah because my my grandma has a like one of those gherkin knives that got given to him not gherkin knives you know kuris oh and yes i once they're a bit like a boomerang or an l shape yes i know exactly the ones you mean yeah i'll also yeah we were joking about it because there's the rules about if you're descended from certain actors but we should we should do a sort of a who do you think you are yeah because it tracing it back what's interesting is that these um you know we've got relatives who are potentially connected very i know for a fact my granddad my great granddad was definitely in the north african

campaign i just don't know what group he was part of what unit but it's interesting that after all that i've now began playing this game i've now made this a big part of my life and when it's resolved i'll probably have spent more time looking into this game playing this game than he would have spent in north africa during that conflict which goes to show that yes it's just a few generations away and geographically not any distance at all but i'm making a silly decision he made a a brave noble sacrifice in you know risking his life out there i'm just tagging along with the game that's far too long to play and you know i'm also putting our friendship on the line ending yeah this was a all these ideas you're having in your your eye opening moments are

making me disinclined to like you because it means there's malice coming my way you feel scared yeah yeah you feel scared a little i'm i'm worried it's gonna end if i don't get through the scenario if i lose in the scenario i'm gonna feel bad you i think the best case is that we draw in the scenario, that means neither of us has to feel particularly bad. I'm fine losing on the scorecard. It's if it doesn't... Get to the scorecard. Yeah. It's like, did you ever have at school...

I didn't play many sports at school, but people who did where a game got to a certain point and they were like, we're calling this off. Oh, yes. The team would be up 7-0 in a football game and they'd be like, do we have to do the second half?

Yeah, at this point you've put all of sporty people on one team and then you've put the rest of us on the other team I would always be the rest of us and that's how it ends and it feels like an exercise in cruelty and that's what this can't be Andy, which is why every single week we need to do this, we need to find

some common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for some common ground I'm trying the intro for common ground I'm recording maybe what you got so this week it's my common ground and common ground is the section in which we come

together as friends again to pick a topic to discuss where we can agree on something and i've brought something today that i hope we can unite on my common ground is that i think the money launderers got it right money launderers got it right that's right the money launderers did get it right which money so sort of brave are you just against paying taxes and in favor of doing crimes i'm not no i see this comes from a conversation i've had over the the christmas period because with a an aggrieved money launderer who society doesn't understand in a sense oh well it's more someone who educated me about an aspect of what they described as fashion and what i described as money laundering oh okay but the more i got into the conversation the more

i realized that there is a merit to this it's just not the thing they were arguing for it's the thing that i read between the lines and understood because i'm a genius okay hit me with it so have you heard of the birkin bag birkin bag the name rings a bell but i couldn't like point on if you know what i mean it's like in my consciousness yeah so i don't even know if this is something i heard of beforehand or if i just i'm aware of it now but birkin is a bag that is part of the hermes brand so yeah it's a it's a very expensive type of bag there's like a whole range of them and they all cost in the the rough region of sort of 35 grand a pop for a bag and that expression that you're showing me now is the same expression i had when i found

out about it what does the bag if unless it's a bag of holding from dnd it's not worth 30 grand now see this is it because i've i found out about this i was i was talking to someone about christmas gifts and i was trying to get an idea of what it is that makes these prestige items worth what they are and i was asking what does this bag do what makes it different from a bag you would buy at primark or next it comes with 29 and a half grand in it well i was like yeah it's got to be you know the craftsmanship must be really good and i've got no doubt it is but the difference and craftsmanship from one thing to another. It's one thing when it's a

watch, it's one thing when it's clothes, when it's a bag. It's all different measurements of craftsmanship. But what I found out about this Birkin bag, it's named after an actress. Okay. And she would carry the bag around sort of just like full to the brim, just like lugging it around

like this, like not by the strap, but just like Oh, it's one of the like big shoulder type bags, not like a clutch or a little Well, it is sort of the brand it's got like a variation of it where you can get like the sort of smaller ones and the bigger ones but the the actress who the bag was then designed on the back of it it was carried around by her as almost like a sort of i carry my life in this bag sort of situation but the bag now

interestingly enough you can't just buy them you can't go into one of these shops and buy the bag you need to build a reputation within your sort of local store with a sales rep i'm gonna because this is something like i'm never probably never going to be involved in because i'm never going to have both the inclination and certainly not the disposable cash but it's like if you want a like high-end ferrari my understanding is you have to buy like five lower down ones or if you want to get like specific rolexes you have to buy a bunch of rolexes you don't want is it like that where it's like it is get this bag you have to spend like 10 times its value on shit you don't want yes you need to buy all the stuff beforehand

and build a relationship with like a sales rep or something and be on almost like a referral list and then eventually when one of these bags becomes available in your area they'll be like oh hi andy um i hear you're a valued customer and we've got one of these bags in we'd like you to be put on the list to potentially buy it oh thank you so much sir and i think this this is the same thing as art, where it's money laundering. It's a way for money to just be lost in translation

where you've attached value that is only attached by the person who's selling it. You've given something value by your own decision. I wouldn't necessarily call it money laundering, but it's like it feels

shady as hell. Yeah. Money laundering is definitely a facetious way to look at it is a lot of modern art is money laundering in a lot of ways yes but this feels like a it's like buying raffle tickets but there's no prize you just get to be in the next raffle yes like it's just steps of nothing like how many people have spent the bags of 30 grand so i'm going to say how many people have spent 200 grand trying to get the bag for stuff they don't want exactly like in a way each bag ends up costing like several million because multiple people have spent way too much just trying to get access to it exactly and i

think that the the money laundering thing it is sort of yeah a cynical way to look at it it's not money laundering but it is attached to the the same value that art is where it's all abstract it's all in the the eye of the purchaser given a value that the one selling it wants it to have i'll give you a a fix to this isn't the common ground in my head well to get to the to get to the crux of it okay when i said they've got it right there is part of this that i like okay what's that and it pulls into something nostalgic for me the one thing that i translated that to is i was thinking about pay to win games i was thinking about you did you used to play call of duty like online uh loved the modern warfare one and two yes them every night after school for

hours me too that is what it evoked in me because i was thinking what i liked about that was that you didn't go into that game and you couldn't just buy the best skins for your weapons so you had to you had to earn them you had to get juggernaut noob tube and the other one so everyone would yell at you yes you had to grind and do something you didn't want to do to then earn a mark of prestige by earning a skin for your gun you had to get so many headshots you had to get so many accomplishments with weapons and then you earn this thing and what this does this situation with these bags it brings that back into the forefront of of culture because it means that you can no longer just buy your way into something and i think this is something that needs to be applied

more broadly you shouldn't be able to just flash your wealth and get something exclusively you need to commit more you need to really show that you're into something so if you want one of these bags for example i'm going to run with this let me tell you if this is what you're thinking uh say you want one of these bags you all go to the shop on the day it's released and then you do a thing where you try and put as much in the bag as possible without it looking ugly or like bumpy and whoever can fit the most in the bag gets the right to buy it. You're like doing challenges to buy it instead of just weird consumerism.

Yes, that is how this should work. It should be about your investment in the product. Because then also that would help those people who buy those status symbols items because it's like he's got the new like underwater rolex submariner which is good to 50 feet that means he went to the rolex store dived into a big pool with a bunch of guys and was the first one to get to the bottom so he got them and then it is like a status symbol it's like that guy can free dive faster than a bunch of other millionaires exactly exactly it's the it's the vidmaster achievements for Halo 3.

I got Recon Armor, Andy. I got all the achievements, the Vidmaster achievements in Halo 3 and Halo 3 ODST, and I got Recon Armor. And then you know what they did in the next few games? They just let you buy it. You just fucking buy them. That's not okay. I bled for that

armor, and these people in the next few games can just buy it. No. They need to earn it, and this, you hit the nail on the head there. You want to go into the shop and you want to get the bag? you need to cram stuff in and show that it's still fashionable you need to wear the Rolex

you need to dive down to the bottom of a pool with no gear whatsoever you need to go down to the bottom you need to be able to tell the time and you need to go back up to the top well the thing I do with that because one of the selling points on watches is it's like it's good to this depth and filling the bag is like

you want the thing to be related to that particular challenge the like Ferrari example I use i think it's a lot of other supercars as well where you have to like buy them instead of that it's like we're gonna release 10 of them go to um silverstone racetrack like le mans like my wherever i'm not an f1 fan but if you want one of these 10 exclusive ferrari you go to a ferrari track day, and whoever's the fastest

can buy the car. If you manage to pull off that race and you win, then you get the car. So, it's not money laundering, it's making status symbols actual status symbols of capability not just like you had rich parents

or whatever, it's like if you see someone with that thing, it's like oh fuck, they actually earned they paid a shitload of money they can still charge a lot but they also they did earn it yes they're on the cusp of the right idea at the moment they're still applying wealth to it because you have to buy all these other things beforehand to gain this brand loyalty and they're nearly there but you need to remove the wealth aspect of that if you want to have it so that i mean you can

you have a barrier before you can buy it like you know the ferrari thing with the track day i meant yes you have to show up in a ferrari maybe but you don't have to buy five ferraris to get the one of like the limited run yes so you still have a bit of a gap or even if you can't reward your customers but also like you're gonna use that thing you've just got yes and it can still be an expensive bag i mean if i could still have it be 35 grand but all of these people who've shown up with 35 grand in their pocket ready to buy it they need to show they're the person who deserves to be sold it and not just by buying more of them yeah you can't just buy a ton of stuff beforehand and then hope that you're the most loyal one because you bought the most stuff

and then also this is another thing because there's something that like really pisses me off uh you know like poverty porn television yes i know the kind of stuff you mean yeah uh you have the influx you broadcast these things so it's like people debasing themselves to buy in a very expensive bag

and then they don't get it yes you get the inverse of like oh you get television isn't just seeing poor people struggle you also get to see rich people whose lives are easier but you do get to see them make

absolute fools of themselves trying to get like a bag or a watch yeah this isn't the you know the you know the working class person on shows like can't pay take it away that was the one i was thinking of that show really sit bad with me where you've got people who are being evicted from their homes because they're in debt and sometimes the debt may be self-inflicted but sometimes it's a landlord who's become you know a little bit overzealous in moving something to the high caught when it necessarily didn't have to be and or it's like they're poor because they're like had to quit work because they're looking after someone and like yeah it's just all sorts of feels like yeah it's people who are already at the bottom of the ladder they're working class

so they're already working for a living but instead flip that in its head you've got these people who are already mega rich and then you watch them try to get this thing that they want and if they fail to be the winner then they are by default the loser and you do another version of this i'm going to add to this i'm enjoying this common ground um you know for like a one of one type watch or something yes you make the rich person like who's like the heir to a fortune or something who might want like a supreme hoodie made out of gold you'd make them like poach an egg or like hoover this house like you make them do the tasks their wealth has removed them from yes to get this weird status symbol thing and we all get to watch them be like

which end of the hoover like yeah these people who are divorced from reality yeah let's give them a bit of reality we get to enjoy them failing to interact with it and then they get to enjoy their like super car designer bag they have to go through a challenge to prove that they are worthy of this item and i think that's what this is we need to bring back the earning side of something you can't just buy your way in you have to earn it if you want a one-of-one like richard millie or whatever he's called watch you have to win to keshi's castle now that would be great i would i would watch that so fucking hard because that was a program that did not hold back on its wild challenges one of the all-time great programs ever because no one won that i mean yeah

people did win like eight people over like 40 seasons or whatever the fuck it was like yeah no one would often win that no they just get slammed into the mud by like a fist so that that is what we need to bring back we need to bring back the Takeshi's castle model for people to get these exclusive items no buying access you do challenges for access the more expensive the thing you're getting access for the more debasing the challenge yes we're gonna bring big fan of that we're gonna bring back earning it's not it's not pay to win it's play to win yeah if you want to be a showy rich guy not just a rich guy who like has a nice comfortable house and like goes on a couple holidays if you want to flex on people you're gonna earn that right likely in embarrassing

circumstances and then you can really flex because you are the winner yes and that's what we're going to be andy when it comes to this game we'll be the winners yeah and at the end of this one of us will win one of us will lose but we both took part we didn't pay our way to the end we played our way to the end and when we finish we'll both buy rolexes on credit cards to remember damn right because we can pay to win but not quite and i can't think of any other better way to end this than with that sentiment that we will play to win yeah i like that one i like that one a lot that was a good common ground you've really brought us together on that well i think that's it i think we've we've made our way to the end of this i hope everyone enjoys a bumper episode

to bring in the new year um i think we've brought a lot of gameplay talk we've waxed about the future of what we're taking on and the philosophical question of why and how we're doing it. And I hope everyone out there has a fantastic new year. If you want to get in touch with us, you know the way.

It's info at warwithamate.co.uk or the website, warwithamate.co.uk or just warwithamate if you're on the Instagram. Stay subtle, humble, and brave in the deserts of your minds. Good night and happy new year.

We'll be right back.