War With A Mate - Episode 65: Dungeon & Drag-On

Episode Date: February 27, 2026

After last week’s episode mishap, the guys have been robbed of their gameplay time, and so instead delve into some thoughts on the game(s) they’re playing. Armed with nothing but anecdotes, these two marvellous story-tellers take us on a journey through their thoughts, their past, their mailbag and of course their Common Ground.

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Because we have your number. Hello, welcome to War with a Mate with me, James. Me, Andy. What a week we've had. It's been a fortnight. It has, it's been a fortnight. for anyone who's been following real time you'll know that the last episode was a bit of a disaster we recorded everything was fine recording wise we played the game it was a jolly good time

but then we had a absolutely atrocious time editing the episode it fell apart and we spent a lot of our time this week trying to fix that and get a work around and make sure it doesn't happen again unfortunately we don't know how to stop it from happening again because we don't know how to fix it it just fixed itself when we rebooted everything the worst kind of issue the one that just kind of disappears because that means it can come back it's there so that has meant we haven't actually had time to play the game this week which is a shame yeah it is a damn shame because i wanted to see what happens on the back of my tactical genius last week i have a big shock for you you've got a big shock for me i do is it sabotaging the audio feed no that didn't feel as

shocking as it should have that was a shock that did get me if that was your plan yeah i want to see how it pans out so it's a shame we haven't been able to play but regardless we're here we're here to chat about i guess we need to talk about the game to an extent we didn't really plan much of this we just decided to freestyle it no we just wanted to provide well do an episode so we keep it up i like i gotta catch yourself from saying provide as if what we're doing is some sort of service yeah it's it's the wrong word it implies value maybe we get we get broad with this one we get holistic with it okay let's let's break down some aspects of the game we don't talk about very often that sounds fun all right you've got one in mind or not in particular but

i'm sure we can find something all right let's let's put out some war with the may um campaign for north africa fun facts and trivia and opinions let's go first one what's your favorite map a b c d or e i've been enjoying d personally that's interesting that's interesting because i was gonna say d it's been where the action's been happening but for me it's also got mercy it feels like action-packed but a bit safe well d for me is sort of the like the the objective zone because for me if i get into zone d if i manage to push into there it's massive progress it feels like winning and i've had a few edges into there with my wall that moved over yep and then also with the movement of my um saharan detachment um by the way this is a podcast where we play

the campaign for north africa except when we don't yeah i just i forgot about the um the fact that we didn't really introduce this one we just really earned an intro this week yeah we play the campaign for north africa every week apart from this week because we messed up the audio for last week we're professionals as well we forgot to mention that part okay i've got another one for you if we're we're spitballing a bit about the game okay shoot uh say we at the end of this instead of jumping up the main game with the same sides we were just going to do the scenario again switch sides okay yeah do you think you would have had like a commonwealth strategy or like from what you've seen me do how you would have played the commonwealth oh i so i guess if we

take the scenario where it gets dropped on me like like now and say we start the game right now and i haven't thought about it my tactic would probably be defensive yeah i think i'd start really defensive and i think part of that is because everything that we've heard from the all the way back to the echoes of war guys on episode three and all of the history segments everything points towards the best route being hard aggression from the axis forces from go which makes me think steadfast defense is probably the way to go for the commonwealth and looking at the the land this is something i've found a lot when i've been doing the saharan detachment funny business is that it's really hard to get to alexandria yes i can see that because you've either got

a well we saw what it did a demoralizing to the point of surrender desert march or get up on the road exactly and the road you can hold even if i managed to circumvent the road and go the desert road if you hold me close to alexandria my only recourse is to beat you in a fight or go through the the swamp like through the the marshes yeah the della yeah and going through the that that region is just a nightmare for cpa so whereas you know you coming to me you've got the option of the desert you've got all the tracks you can go across yes there's breakdown and yes it's going to be a nightmare for your supply chain but it's nowhere near a delta because with the cost for delta crossing those minor rivers it's like a cost of like an extra six cpa just across that one part

of the hex yeah it's not even actually it's the hex side isn't it for most uh i think with the river you might just be when you're crossing the river but even then the delta hex itself is then costly so if you manage to hold off there it's a it's a gold mine of defense so if i were you and i was starting the game afresh i would just hold back there it's kind of risky when you look about the the idea of it at first but then when you realize all you need to do is wait for the supply line to dry up and then it's actually over the access loses yeah don't use that against me do you think that's inherently bad access supply or do you think it's because of your like mess ups at the start uh oh bit of column a bit of column b because the supply line stuff i've

messed that up i'm gonna be remedying that before we go into the full game i'm gonna be changing that up so drastically but i also think the supply structure it feels like there is that that gap between map c and map d it feels like it just it completely changes the game because the road isn't there and more importantly this actual conflict it's shocking how much that missing strip of road is is important for the game to be a game be a game at the first at the start yeah otherwise it's just a very linear tug of war but also it means it means that the like you know the lunges when you like spend cpa and stuff yeah if the road connected and like oh you moved a guy south of the road slightly and suddenly your zone of control

is like skirtable on the road you can like drive 40 hexes in a turn like whereas it takes in an upstage, sorry. Whereas it takes two upstages to cross the gap between the roads, from what I can tell. Maybe one and a half? I think you could do it in one. But you'd be pushing. If you're motorized, you can definitely do it in one.

Right. Because the road ends at the little... when you come down the ridge. Just past Sollum. Is it the healthier pass? I think so, yeah. It takes you just past, so you're actually down the ridge, the slope. is where the road gets you.

And then you've got a sort of dry spell of road. But then you've got that stretch of, like, it must be maybe off the top of my dome, like eight hexes of clear, if not more. I had eight to ten in my head. So you can cross it. You can push infantry to just about cover that. No, two for clear, four breakdown.

Two CPA, four breakdown. Yes, so you can just about cover that with pushing your infantry to 15 CPA if they have ten. yeah if you've got eight cpa for an infantry you can't quite make it i mean if you do push the infantry they're taking a minus five cohesion hit to then attack yes so it's a nightmare scenario and even with vehicles yes you've got the cpa but the breakdown cost really starts to add up so i think the yeah the crossing that that little bridge is such a nightmare that the supply line situation for the axis forces are so devastatingly bad for aggression which is what they have to do

yeah so you need to have a perfectly structured transition between that and i don't know how to do that yet i don't even know how to have a normal one in my own sphere of control so when it comes to introducing that to map d i don't know where to start i think that supply depot you put there is an important step. Yes, Supply Dump 1, which is right at the end of your road. Yeah, I think there's one clear hex you need to go

over to get to Supply Dump 1, as I've titled it. And with that there, I feel like in the main game if I put something similar, it'll be great. Right now, there's two issues, which is one, my supply chain's already ruined. So, it doesn't really work.

There's someone there to take the goods, there's just not someone to deliver them exactly bardia is a perfect little connection point for that i could have to brook to bardia to there and that would be a perfect chain i'd have to have like sort of four or five lines of trucks for it to work seamlessly but it would be seamless the other issue is which i've come to find your bombardment from the the sea your naval that has been surprisingly i've only used it twice but the second it's like on the table it seems to have had a bit of a it adds like it makes everything every coastal hex like amber for you almost yeah regardless of where the rest of my guys are it's a really good way they're always

under threat it's changed my perspective of coastal hexes yeah like that supply dump you've got there is there at the minute but realistically in the main game I won't be. You need it to be. Certain classes of ships can do two hexes. I don't know if you knew that. I didn't. I think it's

cruiser and up. I'd have to double check before I used it but they can do the coastal hex they're in and then further in. That's horrible. So I'm going to have to bear that in mind. I'm going to have to pull my supply dumps even further south which

is i because i've got an idea of where i could position my supply dumps i'm not going to say because this is actually main game tactic but i i do have a bit of a an idea in my head where i'm going to put the starting supply dumps and also where i want to start building some along the way i think that's something i've got wrong this time supply dumps i think i think you should be spamming them probably because they do they cost 10 stores oh yeah so you've got like a dummy one which is i think a dummy one is maybe 10 stores and another like an actual one is like 25 i remember it's it's a low cost for both yeah i remember the dummy one being like free basically because i i reckon i should probably have built at least three or four supply dumps that i haven't

if you built supply dumps when the seventh were at fort maddalena you could have held that position if i'd sent it i kept the fourth indian on the road because obviously i can't let you get on the road yeah that would have been suicide but i should have sent like the second new zealand or something not as a combat unit as a construction unit oh to like follow the seventh and then also they're there if the seventh need like combat support but they're more of a logistical unit that are, like, following the path the 7th have cleared and, like, building roads, supply dumps, that kind of thing. Supply dumps don't need engineering, by the way.

That's what I mean. Yeah, they can just... As long as you've got a guy. So, yeah, yes, I see what you mean, sorry. Just to have a guy as a gap in the middle. Yeah, he's there. Like, you're a military unit on paper, but you are going to be building supply dumps and whatever for this.

You're a construction guy. Yeah, and the only massive saving grace that I can think of that means i'm not gonna be panicked for the whole game is that you can only build roads on unfinished road areas yes you're never gonna get surprised by a road because the roads that exist really are the north road yeah and then there is that one that juts down towards siwa yes uh is that there's a much road on that it comes to track pretty quickly doesn't it um there's barely any road yeah so if but the thing is if that was ever constructed that becomes a terrifying oh i know the one you mean uh it starts on map t and it snakes down if i if you were going to build it it would

probably be me starting to the north yeah if you build it it would because you hold seaward and you're heading you're heading north from the south yes because if that road ever gets finished in the game i guess one it means that we've both been building it because i don't think any one side finishes that without intervention unless it is kind of a weird one though i'll put this up in there like if i saw you building it i wouldn't be like i absolutely have to stop him building that as a matter of course unless it would depend on what's like the roads facilitating that's a good point but if you were just building the road i'd be like well i can also use that road so

I don't know if I'd be bombing road engineers that often I'd definitely be bombing them on like the north potentially but I don't know if I'd be even that bothered about breaking up that road unless it's like if he finishes this road he frees two divisions out

of seaway to the north well it's much worse for me to build because if I build that road if I want to get units down to that road I have to get them all the way down through like madalena and past uh gerabub gotta get them all the way down there and then at that point they've moved down like a full map's worth of track probably yeah it's all the way north to south it's probably two three upstages on the road yeah there's an oasis or two on the way for water and

stores but then when i do get down to there at that point you're already at the connecting road at the top and that road connects to alexandria and anywhere else your men are realistically yeah so at that point your guys can just zip down and then whatever i've just done to get down there all you need to do is that and then you're everywhere like at that point you you hit you hit tabrook you hit bardia you can just dart west and hit realistically anywhere it's like deep desert yeah but you could in theory do that so building that road for me is just uh it's a non starter if it's from siwa i just can't see that being beneficial to me yeah i would have to hold the road on map d for me to even consider building that well you'd basically you'd have to have siwa

like siwa's in a hundred percent lock yeah i'd have to have basically what the win conditions are for the offensive scenario i'd have to have the tactical one yeah most of the true and and siwa if i hold both of those then it's worth it i'd absolutely build the road yeah because then I've got two connection points on map C I can then funnel people in But you probably want me On the Back ten hexes of map D

Before you start that Oh I want you in map E I would not do that if you're still on map D So basically El Alamein onwards That road might get built If I pull off a Graziani Then I'm going to build that road

If you pull off a Graziani you'd not get into that road If you pull off a Rommel pull off a Graziani to the point where I've got Mersa Matruh and then from there I'd have to push you because Rommel got, not Rommel Graziani got to Mersa Matruh did he not

I'm sure he got to Mersa Matruh oh god because the Christmas, not the Christmas offensive that's Sydney for you up here Operation Compass kicked off from the border yes

and that was what ended basically if I remember rightly Graziani's offensive was he took like three towns about ten meters over the Egyptian border and then was like oi Mussolini I've captured some British Egyptian territory I'm gonna

stop now because they did not want to be doing it yeah no maybe I'm I think he could have taken Mersa Matruh if he'd got his shit together I've got my shit together i'd like to say uh do you have mercy but true when i guess when you get it you can say you've got your shit together okay fine i'll take that okay i can finally make my parents proud

take it back three weeks later your shameful phone call uh you need to stop being proud of me for a bit look mom i have mercy but true yeah what are you talking about is this a stupid board game it's not stupid but also yes yeah it's that board game again this board game is not stupid this board game's my lifeblood i've spent far too much time over the last two weeks trying to do things that are so not even directly connected just adjacent to the board game like this has been such a new aspect of challenge of having to fix a podcast problem about the board game that we're playing forever like it's it's the curse is spreading further into my life well it's like a hobby that requires you have ancillary hobbies you didn't expect yeah i now need to like

troubleshoot audio issues on an audio editing software to then release a podcast yeah to facilitate board gameplay and now we've also opened up the additional faucet of trying to work out the logistics of a live show yeah which oh god imagine to be fair the good thing is with the live show is whatever happens with the audio we'll salvage that afterwards at least when we're there as long as we say the words aloud properly then the people can hear them yeah you can't mess that audio up well actually you could i guess you could be not amplified in the room i'm not gonna jinx anything yeah we don't we don't have all the details yet as to how our setup's gonna be we're still also for anyone who's thinking about going there's a 30 chance if there's more

than 10 people in the audience i walk out panic vomit and then james does an hour by himself and the thing is even if it's because i think just by the nature of the look it would have been the uk games expo i think a lot of the people who attend will probably just be drifters coming in to take interest in it yeah people who are just coming to see what's up yeah i don't think it's going to be a majority of people who already know what the podcast is. So anyone who is coming along, expect a bit of a retread

of old ground. How was that thing you went to? Well, one of them was fine. The other one was like shaking and slowly turning yellow. Well, the good thing is, Andy, people won't know us from appearance, so as long as neither of us say anything, they won't know who's who. Oh, I can get a body double.

You don't need a body double. No, because then he's out on stage. oh okay and you're gonna be in the back was that you being on the phone it's like you put your hand on your ear and like the sort of big l shape yeah pretending to be on the phone so you're gonna dial in to the live show you do realize that's what we do every week yeah and this is fine right okay i see you don't want to do live shows you want to do this i can of course please come at the live show it won't be a vomit and juice anxiety nightmare yeah it'll be great you can come and

see me, and you can smell Andy. Oh, that reminds me of that stand-up show. I don't know if we've talked about this before. When we went to that stand-up show, and the guy bombed and went to desperate measures. We must have talked about it. I think we have. Where we saw... If we did, it would have been the first 13, though, because

it is. And that's how we've come back around to it, because this is an episode... Because this is the first 13 episode. Also, weird that the number of that's 13. Yeah. Just makes it sound weird the first 13 we uh yeah we went to a comedy show ages ago years ago and this guy bombed and he decided to get the crowd back on side he drank a bottle of vinegar no just to this guy bombed correct but he was also the mc which meant someone would come out and bomb

and then he'd come out and bomb for five minutes and then someone else who'd never done comedy would come out and then this guy would come out and bomb for five minutes so it's quite an impressive kind of bombing when it's like in and out it's like mc bombing is very funny but to get the crowd back on side at some point it was before we came in he'd made some kind of like promise to the audience that he'd drink vinegar yeah i came into this really late i've been somewhere else We came in as the second-to-last, like, five-minute slot was finishing into a totally silent room. I do remember it being, like, a quiet attic.

I remember us being like, have we come into, like, a private? Have they, like, not rubbed the chalkboard off? Is this, like, Darren's birthday party? Yeah, it's just like someone's giving, like, a best man speech. Not a comedy night. But yeah, and when this guy drank a bottle of vinegar, of course. A pint. oh was it a pint it was out of a pine glass i do i distinctly remember that i think parts of my

brain have like segmented this off because the smell is the only thing i remember because that smell the smell of somebody being sick and it being vinegar that they've just drank is the worst smell you can imagine he did it in the bathroom which was downstairs which is unfortunately the direction you have to go to get out of the comedy they were also stairs uh the door we had to come down to get from the top of the pub down the stairs on the left there's the bathroom door which doesn't close properly and then on the right it's the door into the bar area so you're in an airlock of the worst vinegar vomit and the that's also i have a bar i have vinegar on chips and like i like vinegar that is the strongest taste of vinegar i've ever had

purely through the nose yeah I think there must be something about the way it aerosolized when it mixed with the bile in the man's stomach I guess I hope you're not eating while you're listening to this episode certainly not fish and chips

it genuinely put me off vinegar for to be fair I still don't really have much vinegar anymore fair enough that was absolutely traumatic we went to a few open night open mic comedy thing so we had a brief stint where we were like

these are fun. We did and it wasn't they were not fun. And it wasn't because it was like great quality performance it was, I'm actually going to another live comedy show in a few weeks like a proper one or? Yeah like an actual one at the comedy club. Oh right then yeah. So it

is an actual one so I'm interested to see how that pans out because my last experience, to be fair the last time I went to a live comedy night was to see limmy you know the scottish that would be good yeah it was really good he's doing a reading from a show um from a show from his book i'm thinking of limmy's show um and uh afterwards he was doing autographs and the only thing i had in my wallet was a ryman's 10 off voucher and i pulled that out and i was like oh can you sign this and he's like i don't know what this is uh signed it and

he's like this isn't gonna expire it is it this is gonna make it void and i was like i've had this for like five years and he's like all right and then my friend i was with had a packet of fishermen's friends and he signed those just a nice guy i only knew that i had the ryman's gift card in my wallet because earlier that day i'd this was actually tied to dnd when we were doing our um war of the worlds dnd campaign yes and i was printing off all of those legal documents yes just a fun caveat for dnd i printed off a bunch of like fake uh employment contracts so the players could sift through them to try and track down it was a really cool like real life puzzle where we were like this guy's on the visitors log but he's not on the manifests

yeah like it was a it was a really cool thing but not for you well it was a lot of i guess yeah there's caveats to this but the so printing it off i had to print off all these documents and i had to get printer ink so earlier that week i'd been into ryman's and i went in i was like oh i need to order a um a printer cartridge but i don't know what printer i've got and he's like do you have like a picture of it i was like no i was like oh i do have this gift card that i got when i bought the printer so i pulled it out he's like oh it's that's expired and i was like no no it's just you can identify it and it did have the the model of the printer on it so i got the printer ink that i needed and then when i was at the show afterwards remembered i had that got it signed um

but the the thing that you've referenced there me not having a good time with that is because in order to do this complicated uh dance of printing fake legal documents for a tabletop game i subscribe to this website that provides um legal document templates to like law firms yeah it's like like yeah like budding law firms and it's like um like non-disclosure agreements and employment contracts so i used actual contract templates because i wanted to feel like genuine and i didn't want to type up like oh you know mr jones works for this law i wanted to feel genuine also you wanted to avoid i assume in the back of your head the mistake not the mistake sorry the thing that happens quite often when you go for like an extra element on a dnd puzzle

where we're like is this indicative of something the villain's done or did you make a typo yes do I need to spend the next 20 minutes being like well the Y was swapped with the T so that probably

means that like which we've done prime example is the cut out puzzle where our former friend didn't believe us when we found the solution that was so we're going on some dnd tangents here but you know what dnd is it's another fun ball game we don't have any uh we haven't played campaign for north africa this

week we have played dnd well the thing is we've had a lot of questions about our dnd yeah as well so here's a bit of insight for those that are interested for those aren't i'm really sorry we were trying to fix last week's episode we'll bring more campaign for north africa we swear to god um but the see yeah this was a formative puzzle and the first campaign that we had so i put together uh so picture this an a4 sheet of paper with just letters all over just random letters and in different orientations so some of them upside down some of them sideways and the solution to this puzzle was to get the a sheet of paper which was got we ended up getting multiple with holes cut out of them yes so you got sheets of a4 paper that had little slits cut

all around them, so that if you overlaid those slits on this big sheet of paper with random letters, you could spell out various words. And I'd done it so you could spell out a bunch of different words. Some of them were red herrings. You'd also, if I remember, that sheet, you'd done so there were two...

Because in-game they were, like, tablets with stuff etched out of them. Yes, they were like stone tablets, yeah. And we got two of them that applied to the same source. Yes. um so you could get a different orientation of information depending on how you spun it yeah

and then we used the same one again yes i used that for more information so like this core like cipher just kept coming up but we had ways to get different information out of it yeah so it made a bit of a fun through line for these puzzles where it was like oh we've got this again and we we were playing with a friend of ours at the time who decided that instead of it being this is when you only had the sheet of random letters and before you got the the slit paper his his conviction was that it is definitely some sort of cipher that's needed to break it and you'd also given us the like are the the wizard uh looking at you as like smart but i i think we're missing like you've done as much dm like flagging that this is not something you

can solve yet as possible without just being like stop fucking trying to do that yeah it was like telegraphed as the puzzle is you need to go on a quest and find the missing piece yeah to figure out anything beyond that you just have to sit and stare at the paper until you've found the combination of letters that made sense with something that unfortunately you need the rest of the sheet of paper with holes on for it to make sense you can maybe find words on there but it's sort of like using a word search but you still need the rest of a paragraph for the words to fit into so that was such a those moments are so difficult when you play dnd and you're the you're the guy dming where you have to try and nudge people in the right direction and sort of

be like you're on the right track and i'm really happy that you're engaging with a puzzle that i've made but stop fucking around this is not the solution if you continue to do this you've ruined the game but it's such a difficult dichotomy of i'm proud that i've made something you enjoy enough to engage with and i'm so frustrated that you've missed the mark to the point where this puzzle is not worth actually doing yeah well it wasn't quite engaging with it because again as i said we had all the information yeah you didn't need to engage in that sense yeah i guess the fact that someone decided that there's something to crack despite there not being just to give an example of how frustrating this would be in a tv show if someone like got an encrypted hard drive

in like a spy show and then they found out like oh you need the decryption key from someone else you have all these episodes where they go try and get the decryption key and then it turns out some guy at the lab has fragged the hard drive you took because he was trying to like decipher it but you kept drawing i remember he kept like looping around them being like i found a word it's like cool and then we found the thing and he was like there's gonna be more things i'm gonna be able to guess these this is like a sheet of paper with like a thousand characters on it i made them really small so that you couldn't just guess stuff yeah if it was like 10 letters on the page it would kind of defeat it so i made it really small and to loop back around as well i

completely uh we missed the the first point with this legal document oh yes subscribe to to make these fake documents i had um subscribed to it as a free trial for 30 days because i thought right i'll bang out all of these documents get them ready i know what the the sort of story arc is i need to get these ready and then i'll cancel it i forgot to which unfortunately put me onto an annual subscription well once a year and this happened three years on the trot because i would forget to cancel it i was billed like 130 pounds a year particularly broke being billed for software for law yeah we because at the time we both lived together yeah that was in the first because that was the first first place we lived together yeah first place we lived together second place yeah

all three all three places that we live together yes i i guess finding out now uh i was the case and once we were living together you could were finally allowed to cancel the subscription i think it was moving in with a significant other at the time and it's sort of like taking control of financial commitments and it's like so what's coming in what's going out what's this oh that's an excellent question i don't have a good answer for it well i have a good answer for it it's just not i have an explanation i don't have a reason no betty i've got the reason it's i don't have an excuse i'm a fully grown man i shouldn't be getting billed 130 pounds a year for something i used once for 12 days but that's dnd that's that's the fun of it we we've had some great

campaigns oh yeah a lot of fun dnd and i think um what we should do is maybe loop back around to the original idea of campaign for north africa and war with a mate that was a fun tangent and yeah i'm sure we'll find a way to get more dnd stuff we made the gameplay up with some chat about the game and then another 15 minutes of just other gameplay we've had that's it we promised gameplay we gave you gameplay and yeah we kind of spoofed the rules probably the wrong episode to be getting indignant yeah i suppose that's not really anything that we have a right to right now no but yeah a lot of guys have um been asking about um our dnd campaign so there's a bit of an insight now i think we will try and find an avenue to talk a little bit about

maybe not like a certainly not a critical role style thing but just maybe share a bit more and wax a bit we're looking at doing some additional content this year so maybe that'll be part of it yeah but now is the time for sticking to what we intended to do in fact sticking to a vow a vow from episode nine all the way to now which is reading the fan mail getting into that mail bag and we have some mail you have i believe the first bit of mail i do i've got one from nil nil let's hear what nil has to say howdy y'all i've emailed you once before and i've sent in a bit of a cheeky web form but i don't know if i'd count that since it was so short and basically just a joke anyways the point is that i'm sorry if i'm spamming your inbox you're not we love to

hear from all of you don't worry about that we get spam but the spam is usually seo marketing yes we've not got spam from fans it's just that i've caught up by now and still have a few notes and questions that weren't asked slash mentioned yet in episode 52 you mentioned that you might be able to finish one up stage per week that's not looking good today and also you mentioned that that was quite quite ambitious a bit later but if it is ambitious right now it might just be a decent pace once you've further streamlined everything and are very familiar with the rules yeah i'd say that's what we're like looking for it would be good if we could get to that pace with everything in place yeah when we really start to get into a flow state that would be

perfect that'd be great if we can start getting an upstage every week and uh nil's gonna tell us why it's important we do because also to give the calculations a bit more wiggle room oh no let's give you a bit of a buffer and say there are 15 weeks where you can't finish an upstage uh be it because you can't play that week or because of an upstage is taking too uh taking longer than one session or because whatever we're recording with doesn't decide to have the same record rate yep that means if there are 52 weeks per year you will finish approximately 52 minus 15 so 37 op stages per year since it's 111 turns each turn has three op stages at least if i understand that correctly which you have absolutely uh that puts the whole

game at uh 333 upstages now to calculate the time uh it will probably take you to finish the game we just calculate 333 by 37 which gives us a nice and even nine uh which would in fact be on the lower end of the estimations you've made on the podcast if we finish this game in nine years i will be absolutely bewildered and overjoyed to a dizzying extent i'll be i'll be chuffed with that yeah nine years would be a fucking miracle yeah at this stage i genuinely think we're looking at like 20 yeah and that that's my optimistic like my heart of hearts that is my optimistic bet at the moment i know we've looked at all sorts of other figures like 48 at current pace and nine here has been proposed with an off stage a week i i really think like 20 yeah i think it's the same

unless for some reason we are able to give a lot more time to the game. Which would be great. I mean, I love it, but also... I don't know how that becomes viable. We have jobs. I guess if we both win the lottery, the podcast will be shorter. But we'll also really embellish it if we win the lottery. We'll go ridiculously overboard with production.

Secondly, I'd like to make a comment about the email from Milan who talked about three different weird battles in World War II. the polish unit which held off a german unit 40 times their size and only surrendered because they ran out of ammo and the battle where the way marked a few uh we're marked vermacht i think yeah i think it's yeah i don't know why that stumbled me so badly a few americans and a bunch of french prisoners among them a high-ranking politician um i don't remember who exactly anymore fought against the ss and a third one of very few chinese defending a warehouse against the japanese i love that one that was that was really cool yeah anyways what

the first two have in common this besides being in europe is that the band uh sabaton made songs about both yeah i know sabaton oh really yeah yeah i know sabaton and do you know these songs I know Sabaton, but not well enough to know the song names. So I may well have heard these tracks, but not know that I've heard these tracks. The one about the first event's called 40 to 1, and the second one's called The Last Battle. They aren't as good as I remember them being,

but still quite enjoyable in my opinion. Definitely going to give them a listen. Sabaton's very much a band I would play during D&D for our combats. Because in our big bombastic combats, I usually put on, like, metalcore kind of music for the backdrop for boss fights and stuff. Like Linkin Park-y?

No, because that's more like a... Tool, Pussver? Close to the tool, I would say. Right. Yeah. I use them for the battle music. You actually use quite a wide variety of battle music.

Yeah, it tends to be sort of like Architects, Bring Me the Horizon. Yeah. A lot of metalcore I use for those fights. Sabaton's definitely on the heavier side. less metal core more metal i wonder if they'll make it into the rotation could well be if we ever find ourselves in a battle that's completely lopsided so i've got i've got the entire last six months of dnd you said that with real stress it's been it's been difficult it's high stakes

it really this is the end of a 10-year run yeah if we lose the campaign set and gets removed yeah that is the stakes that i currently go back to dnd we're wrapping up a 10-year story and it's a crossover of multiple campaigns in multiple settings that all share one sort of collective metaverse not actually that's a different thing not the metaverse and if yeah if the guys lose um we'll not be playing in those settings anymore we'll start new settings so there's a lot at stake actual real life memories so maybe we'll put some of these songs on 40 to 1 and the last battle nils has a few uh questions about the game as well please lay them on us because we've diverged enough yep after a barrage or bombing how is it determined

which unit is pinned uh it's a good question i don't think we've covered this i don't know target selection i don't think we've talked a whole lot about yeah so when you it's different for land and air but it's sort of similar so for land using this example uh units get into combat you declare you're barraging and when you do you go I'm barraging this hex with this many barrage points then the other player

doesn't give you full details but they'll be like there's four infantry three guns and two armor yes you got a very high level overview of the types that are in there and the quantity of them then they the way we've been doing

it is then the person will be like I want to bomb your armor the person randomly assigns like numbers or letters yeah we'll change it up and we'll we'll assign some aspect of randomness so that the other person can't always kind of go well last time i got uh three on number one and i'm gonna try and double tap them so yeah we try and mix it up but you get the the broad description that does change if you collect enough information though because if you know a specific thing is in a hex, you can say you want to

bomb it. Yes. So if you know, I'm going to use the second New Zealand because I know them off the top of my head. If you got into combat with the second New Zealand and you knew the 28th Maori were in there, not just because of your historical knowledge,

but you'd confirmed it with air recon or patrols or you'd fought them before. Yes, in the game sense, you need to know. Your game intelligence needs to be fulfilled yeah then you can be like i know that is in there i want to bombard that and like name check it yes but otherwise it's the random selection process for bombardment a psychic glance of sorts yes and it works basically the same for air combat uh the like ordering slightly different but you bomb you get you declare the mission and then you get that same

set of options yes yeah air bombardment is how does that differ again yeah so you you drop your your bombs you got there because you make sure that you're not looking at the torpedo option and then you drop your bomb points you roll on the table determine i don't know if it's in the game or if we just do it in a different order yes because sorry no i got it wrong because the way i'm air bombardment works is you can pin more than one thing yes so what you do is you at least what we're doing might be wrong we need to confirm this one but so far it's worked it's been fair yeah um you roll you might get four pinning points i guess you'd call them uh then you can apply them using the same system we talked about where you don't know what they are

only real difference in that case is artillery and armor cost two yes so if you get two points, yeah, so to speak, then you can do two infantry or one tank. If you get three, you can do three infantry or one tank, one infantry. Yeah, because you mix and match a few times. Which I thought is a pretty good rule

because it means you can have an objective with a bombing, but if you don't hit it, you can still have an effect. Yeah, so if you're going to go for armor... I'm going to bomb this because I want to get rid of the two armor units I know he has there oh i only got three i can still maybe i'll take out them yeah yeah maybe i'll take out one

armor and one infantry maybe i'll just go for three infantry and try and yeah in that case probably three infantry for combined arms yeah which i love to do yeah um good question though yeah question uh second question you have mentioned multiple times that if no victory condition is met until the end of 111 terms victory is determined by victory points how are they calculated and is that calculation different in game than it is in the scenario yes it is very very different in game to the scenario very quite vastly yeah when it comes to it actually has a mechanism in place if there's a sort of stalemate which is a point system yeah which i actually think is what it's kind of intended to hit because the others are like

decisive strategic victories that they're very it's like gone like you basically rendered the other person unable to play yeah one of them is one of the players has made a drastic mistake to the point where the game state is not really retrievable which we we're kind of weighing up if we hit those whether or not we continue i think it'll be a timing thing and uh also So really enjoying doing this at the minute. Yeah. Maybe a decade from now, we'll see an out and we'll take it. Well, that's it.

We've got to see what that looks like at the time. But it is a good question because it's going to be the end, really. And if we do make it the full 111, which I really, really hope we do, then it means when it comes to the end, we'll have a calculation of points which consist of the areas you control. so it's got a list of all the different areas and the points that they represent in specific settlements yes so you could own every desert hacks hex on the map but if you haven't taken the cities that's worthless yeah we're not playing carcass on yeah so it has to be actual locations

um you know your mercenaries um some of the villages and burrs might be left off there i've not looked at the list and crazy i think the ones on sort of the fringes of d and b that might not count aren't really but like most of the like solemn's on there oh yeah all the ones 50 points or something yeah map c will be huge points so they count towards it as well as the redistribution of your men so if you get your men to is it alexandria i have a withdrawal schedule i don't know if you do i i think i might i've not looked at it because it doesn't play into the scenario yeah um but basically you've got withdrawal moments um for when a unit has like a historical would have left the theater historically so i lose a chunk uh on the greek invasion

around then, but basically when I get a unit, sometimes it'll have a thing of being like, it arrives on turn 11 it needs to leave on turn 32, upstage 2 you get points for doing that you get points for getting rid of prisoners

not getting rid of prisoners, you get points for getting a prisoner to either Tripoli or Alexandria and then shipping them off to Europe and you also get them if you voluntarily withdraw your men for a period of time yes you can send people away um to fight the the war effort elsewhere which that's an interesting mechanic to me because that

on any other game i'd be like i'd like i'm gonna note that but i'm gonna play two or three games first so i get a sense of when i can get rid of people and when i can't yeah you go you don't get to do that no chance of that here so that mechanic i don't know i don't know about you but i'd be really very tentative about using it yeah because i have to go back and check but i think it's when you you can i think it's alexandria for you i think you can get them there you ship them off and i think it's every turn that you keep them off the board you get a point i think it's a lot i think it's every like three or four like maybe three it might be that might be three upstages i I think it's like a turn or something.

I think it's more than a turn. Really? I might be... But because of that, you could be like, I'm going to take everyone out. And then put them back in. Yeah. For instance, like, you know, with your Saharan stuff.

Yeah. I could have got rid of everyone from Alexandria and Cairo. Seeing that no one was close enough to... And then if you got close enough, if you can bring them back at will... Then you can return them to fight. Almost certain. we've not had to look at this because of the scenario

but I'm almost certain there's it's a chunk of time for points and like a month to bring them back yeah because otherwise you can just dip them out and bring them back when you need them yeah which would only

one is very gamey and cheesy like that's a game mechanic not a mechanic representing or simulating something and this is a simulation and it was also deeply unfair because alexandra is massively more accessible than triplet a you'd have to get to the edge of the map spend a turn getting them there all those timers kick off you start it again it's a turn

to get back yeah um it's also to get them to triply or tripletania it's like two or three turns so yeah yeah so that's another that's another point system you can utilize and i I think that might be it, point-wise. I don't know if there's anything to do with units that remain. Off the top of my head, I don't think there is. No, I don't think you get points for just having things survive. No, I think in areas you control and units that you've used to exchange for points, whether they're prisoners or withdrawals

or voluntary reassignment. I think that's it. Third question. Yep. Can you destroy supplies? for example when you know that an enemy force is going to take a supply dump but you still have a unit there can you they uh then destroy the supplies or to ground it more in what you guys have been doing could andy's truck bandits have gone into a supply dump take what they can carry

and basically torch the rest it seems like something that would have done by now uh but also it's something that seems so basic it would definitely be in the game and you have nailed that because it's something that should have happened by now but hasn't and it is in the game you betcha you can do that it's a percentage of CPA if I remember rightly

I can't remember the conversion there's a blow supply dump action which you can also do it's one of the only actions you can do at any point that you move so if you retreat or surrender you can do it

uh yes well there's a couple of caveats to that so with a supply dump yeah so if you're fleeing a supply dump whether you're walking through it and you just decide well this is gone you can blow it and destroy a percentage if you're retreating from a supply dump or through a supply dump you can blow it on the way through and if you're surrendering if you vault so if i'm being attacked by andy and i decide you know what i'm gonna surrender my guys maybe i'll get to rescue them and get replacement points later i can surrender my whole division for example and as part of that i can just scuttle my trucks i can blow up all of my trucks i can destroy the supplies in there oh does that buy a supply dumps as well uh supply dumps as well um if you surrender look

at that i'll have to check the wording on it but i think as part of the voluntary surrender you can destroy all supplies well not all but you can destroy maybe it is all when you surrender maybe it is all. If it is all, you're not going to have a fun time next to him. You're not going to surrender, are you? The guys in Bardia.

Oh my god. There's two convoys and a city full of supplies. Yeah, there is. No, no, no, that can't be true. That'll be a rule. Right, they don't have the trucks assigned, which I hope plays into it.

No, they do. Did I assign them when I entered the seat? No, you did, you did. I said I assigned them when I entered the seat. I don't know if you sent me them, but in games terms, they're assigned. Of course, yeah, you definitely assigned them because that means I didn't have any truck convoys

apart from the one on my airfields. Yes. Which is where the knife edge situation came from. So I know you've definitely assigned them. Good point. Yeah, we'll have to look at that because I will have a bad time. Because that might be a hundred men

blowing the shit out of Bardia in every truck they can find before being gunned down. Oh dear. Not gunned down, turning themselves over. You've really created a point of contention here, Nils. You could have just lost me Bardia. That's a fantastically

timed email. Terrible email, Nils. What are you doing? I thought you were sending good questions, but now I'm second guessing myself. He's not done yet either. I'm excited to get to this fourth point. I wonder when this is going to open up for me. it's just about the fact that legally you don't have to buy me a kinder bueno what the fuck finally um you know great point about the the supply dumps because we yeah like andy said we

should have done this by now we haven't it's a while that we haven't because it would have been a great truck bandit move i think what i've had in my head is if i remember rightly it's like percentage of cpa for percentage of supply dump it must be some sort of exchange when you're doing a raid where you're already like this guy has 30 CPA I'm using 35 to get to a strategic location and cause problems

don't have any CPA to like yeah you don't have anything to spare at that point but fourth question this about this one's about construction do you have to tell your opponent that you are constructing something slash have constructed

something and in either case is it that way for all construction i could imagine a funny or at least one-sided scenario where someone fortified a settlement and everyone didn't know about it so they try to attack it but then realize it's a fortress and now they have absolutely no chance of winning the fight now that's a good question and that's one i i'm personally not sure on because of the in the rules there's an addenda within the rule actually written in the rule book because they clearly wrote the rules realize they can't go back and change them all so they just added notes and one of the addenda is all about

reasonable knowledge of information and obfuscation which is that unless you're explicitly told in the rules that the player the opposing player has to know then they don't know however when it comes to construction there are construction markers to put down on the board here's what my understanding of this is you declare construction without the specific purpose because you can also be

constructing fake either supply dumps or minefields yeah I think from what I remember you just say I'm doing construction here and then you put down the construction marker

if it gets interrupted it doesn't and then depending on what you've built because like if you built a road they'll know yeah we've been quite generous that's from the outcome yeah and also i think we've we talked about enigma and espionage a little bit i think that's sort of built into this in my the way i think of it of like you as like the access commander would probably get from your reports there's signs of construction here. Yeah. Like your

recon planes and your intercepts might be like, well there's more supplies going here. There's men concentrated here. But like an enemy commander, you know construction's happening there but you're not like they're building this

or this or this. Yeah. Because I think the top down view of the map you get is relatively accurate. You see you see you know units move but i think that's the i think that's designed intentionally or not as anything here on the map is in my opinion like justifiable like there's no fog of war like i know what you're doing on map a that's the kind of thing i like reach to of like it there's an assumption that you both have

intelligence yeah and that agenda in the rule i think applies more to specifics yeah like you say there's no fog of war i think it's like yeah something like construction surely you would get intel to say you know what they're doing but you don't know if they're building a road or a mine you just know supplies are arriving here and people are here yes so i'd have to we'll definitely double check that when it comes to the full scenario right now we're being very transparent where if i'm building something i guess the only thing we don't share is if i'm building a minefield or a supply dump i won't say i'm building a fake one or a real one but i will be like i'm building a supply dump or a minefield i also i don't know if there'd be much to lose in the real game

for things that you can't build a fake one from i think there would be in terms of do you then prioritize stopping someone from building it like if i'm on a hex and i'm building a road and i can build a road on either side of that hex if i've got an engineering unit that might change your perspective on it compared to if i was building a supply dump or maybe crucially i'm thinking airfield yes good point yeah so i guess it that would probably be real utility to knowing the specifics of it we definitely wouldn't share the specifics in the real game i do think we would share that construction's being built well i did uh the second new zealand have been i think we did this because it was so obvious but the second new

zealand last year and starred construction on the this the bit of road you'd bombed with the down upslope yes just to the west of miss matru um i put that down and just said i'm doing construction and i think if i remember rightly you were just like so you're building a road because yes there's two bits of destroyed like some of it's incredibly obvious but i didn't explicitly tell you yeah what i was building and there'll be certain points where yeah we can make that educated guess yeah or it could be a you know a bit of a could be a weird time to build a like oh he's repairing the actually thinking about we're talking earlier right you know that seawater road yeah you build the road build the road build the road i get in my head oh he's just in a river

and he's building the road suddenly you build like an airfield and like use your transports to drop guys over yeah because then I've got a full road that takes you up to there and I just ferry everything up all of a sudden it's full of an air force that can you get an SGSU

there quicker via the road yes so that kind of thing is like yes that might even be one when we look at it if it's not explicit I think we err on the side of don't yeah unless there's a specific

real saying tell them which I don't think there is we don't yeah I think that's the safe bet well thank you very much Nils it's been a beefy one but a lot of really good questions yeah brought us back around to the topic Nils does finish

off the only thing left to do is wish you the best of luck crossing the desert of your minds subtly humbly and bravely Nils PS that greeting is only because i thought y'all might like that y'all i'm from nowhere near where you would say that we do love a y'all we do love y'all it's also one of our sort of shared slow common grounds of we'd like y'all to just seep out yeah i'd like it not to be a stereotypical yeah it shouldn't be confined to a region or a well a state because i think texas i think yes

texas the south that's what i come to immediately in my head so like as listeners pointed out it's the perfect like non-gendered yeah it's just so broad and generic you can hit anyone with that so yeah nil's awesome email thank you for that i think that's that'll be the only email we cover because i think we've got our money's worth from that one yeah we really got our teeth into that one so thank you for that and anyone who wants to send anything else over whether it's questions about the game or questions about anything or just a few statements by all means or a heathcliff comic strip um we have our email address info at warwithamate.co.uk our website warwithamate.co.uk or our instagram which is just warwithamate and we take messages through all of them anything you

send we'll get there eventually and we'll we'll read it we'll respond to it if you want us to and that's that's kind of it for the mailbag well with the end of that particularly delved into mailbag we are i understand forgoing a history segment this week because we have a good momentum on what's going on with that history segment and you've not had the adequate time with this week's massive upheaval of strategy and structure to really put together what we need for that history segment which is continuity and i guess we'll keep the history segments on the main series at least yeah this has become something of a something of a tangent i instead propose that we hit a common ground andy and now for something nicer a little oasis in the war it's time for

some common ground i'm trying to interrupt the common ground i'm recording maybe yeah it's not the game driving us apart this week it's technical issues have been driving us together almost but i think we could use some a nice bonding experience to go out of this on absolutely so i would say that the only common ground which usually is a segment to bring us together because the war is driving us apart but since technology is driving us apart i think that there's no better way for us to come together than to attack something completely separate to technology okay my common ground is that people who are letting dreams ruin their day need to stop um yeah 100 is that a is that a thing do you run into people who dreams have ruined

their day i run into people i've had interactions with people just before you do you mean you do mean dreams as in like subconscious like when you're in bed yeah not people aspiring for things no people should aspire yeah that's a good yeah very good specification it's good to have aspirations that shouldn't maybe they will ruin your life but i guess that's but at least in a way you're pursuing something yeah that happens but i think when people allow when they've been to and then he said been to sleep when people have been to sleep visited sleep yeah well when they my favorite way to refer to going to bed is i'm going to go see what's on my mind which

I think is pretty cool but that's kind of what this is though that's the core of this issue because I've known people where a bad dream they'll wake up and they'll go I had this bad dream this will ruin my day or people who and this one's a bit more far detached from

this is more anecdotal where you hear about people where they've had a fight with someone in their dream and then the next day they hold a grudge that's what came to mind when you said it that's surely just a sitcom trope like stuff stuff like that fair enough because that would be a relationship ending i'm not dealing with this shit thing if someone woke up and were like you cheated on me in my dreams i'd

be like i'm gonna give you like sort of 20 seconds to realize that was your subconscious yeah i'm just this i'm not taking the flack for this and and this idea um sort of came from a bit of the inverse of this which was that there was a situation i had um just last night actually which is where this common ground came from so when so i found this story out this morning from my girlfriend who had explained that last night what had happened is she had had some sort of um massive pain in her leg when she woke up the middle of the night like a cramp or something and i had then woke up in my sort of half sleep slumber state and she'd sort of stirred and i'd said in my sort of half awake state something like i'm really sorry he told me to do that and

it would hurt which which without delving into that timing yeah without delving into whatever that meant because i don't remember that dream so the unfortunate reality is she wakes up with a severe pain in her leg i've then said i'm sorry i did that he told me to do it he told me it would hurt so she's then very disturbed because the first reaction in this also half sleep state is have i just been injected with something is he just have i been you know hit or stabbed what's going on so i was told the story um this morning when i woke up and i was like that's insane like that's crazy timing for me to have said that like that that makes me think because it it's like have have we fallen asleep with the television on

and there's been some shared thing? But the fact that for her, a physical pain, and for me to make reference to something so broad and so specific at the same time, I was like, well, that is understandable to be freaked out about because when I heard that, I was like, that's crazy timing. Those kind of coincidences really tickle my brain in a very particular way.

those coerces that I do tend to chalk up to confirmation bias yes you know they're like oh the song I'm thinking of is coming on the radio yes and you're not remembering all the other times or in this case she's not

remembering the time she's woke up with like a leg cramp and you've been like like and not said anything well that's it and I guess that is another point how many times have you know we had a cramp and the other one hasn't said something odd because also just along the lines of

cramps as well I get cramps in my shins sometimes in particularly if I'm like dehydrated but they happen at night and it's this thing of like I'll wake up from it and there'll be like a tickle of pain in my

calves and from that moment I have like three seconds to get out of bed and stand up and walk a few steps and then the pain goes away otherwise my cough hurts for the entire day because the like spasm starts oh yeah so for anyone who's like seeing it like you know the dreams where you like wake up like from falling yes yeah just when you abruptly come out of like deep sleep yes when that happens i now immediately roll out of bed and take like two steps because it's either a dream like that

or my calves are about to like cramp up so i just get out of bed incredibly erratically which apparently is a great strategy that and i don't know what to what extent this is true i know we've got a few guys who um who listen in some some of you folks are in the military so you may be able to attest to this but apparently a strategy employed by some military personnel is the second that you wake up you roll out of bed that you get straight up and it just removes any of that sort of decision paralysis where you're in bed like uh i'm gonna hit snooze i need to lie in a bit instead it just immediately wakes your body up so you just remove that Oh, that's definitely a thing.

So in a way, you've trained yourself as the perfect middle-of-the-night sleeper agent. But also, your day is more productive if you get out of bed straight away. Oh, yeah. But I cannot sit. One of my most enjoyable things is you set an alarm like 40 minutes early with the intention you're going to snooze. Yeah. You know that, like, half-asleep, half-conscious state?

I really enjoy that. Like, I don't know why. I think that's a... I know snoozing along might be bad, like, for productivity creating, guys. It's one of the best bits of that. Well, I'll see your good situation and I'll raise you one. It's when you wake up and you're in that sort of slumber state of, oh i bet when i check my phone i've got half an hour until my alarm goes off and you look at your

phone it's half two and it's like i've got all night still i've got all night i don't have that really i'm if i wake up early and like don't spasm out of bed immediately if i'm in bed for like five minutes i know what time it is by the light and the level of traffic on the street at this point that's a good point you live on a fairly busy street during the day like i will wake up and i'll be like do i need to get out of bed like an alarm hasn't gone off now i'll be like oh so it's 7 15 and it'll i've got weirdly good at that yeah i yeah i guess you've got traffic i've got like litmus things between the light level and the traffic level i can yeah i can just place that now whereas i couldn't live in a quieter area

like traffic wise which i i'd be i don't know how i could handle that like because i go back to my parents which is not as quiet as yours seems to be it's a terrace house you don't tell it's too quiet like i go back on christmas eve still i just never sleep and it's not christmas excitement it's like why is there no noise yeah i've been to your parents once and all i can picture is the the front room i can't picture the street so i can't picture the the area around it but the yeah so to go back to the the core of the common ground it's people holding dreams against you yeah so in this situation i'm bewildered this is crazy what a coincidence but when people instead apply this like broad

it's it's a bit like um like oh well i wouldn't dream it if my subconscious hadn't picked up on something which and that i that i kind of get because if anything that's kind of the problem because i think that the core issue behind a dream is it's it's your own mind yeah it's just a thought it's something that's actually going on in your head already it's entirely internal oh yeah there's no unless you've you get those sort of dreams sometimes where like it sort of blends over to real life where you hear like a noise and then it like plays through lucid dreams yes sort of but not even like lucid where like there's like a like an alarm goes off and it's in like the last few seconds of your dream yeah but for the most part 99 your dream is completely

internal self-contained it's your own thoughts it's your own it's stuff that's happened to you through the day that's bothered you it's the last thing that you watched on telly before you go to bed it's all subconscious stuff yes it will have a meaning so to speak because it's it's your own thought it's kind of like when you're going through the day and you have like a subconscious thought and something plays on your mind it's that except you don't have the executive function to kind of go well all right i'm gonna stop thinking about this and you also half remember it well that's another thing you're filling in the blanks it's a memory of a memory so you you're filling in blanks there's so many layers on layers of this doesn't really track and i think when people

allow that to influence their day or their mood some of course some things are subconscious you can't change how some things make you feel that would be crazy but what you can do is maybe take a moment to to remeasure the situation and remember this is all in your head in the very literal sense you thought of this because i also have that with not dreams where i have to catch myself where i'm like oh i've not messaged this person while they like hate me or like all that like yeah really unhelpful your thoughts run away they're really tough and it's like that is the stuff you like you just have to catch you can't let it like spread but when you're asleep it's your brain doing that with like you're watching in the passenger seat jet engines attached to the

car as well you're not driving and it's one of those cars they drive on like the salt flats to like to break the land speed record you just no control yeah yeah i i get entirely the 100% on the common ground of shouldn't matter and this is not to dismiss anyone who finds a meaning in their dream because I'll say that you can find meaning in your dreams

you can look into your dreams but it shouldn't be in like a specific thing like against a person yes if you're constantly having a dream about like I don't know drowning or constantly having a dream about like going into the first place you ever worked

awesome that kind of it is like yeah maybe that's something happening with you yeah that's probably if it involves anyone else you're you're running the npc yeah that's your thought on them that's how you're perceiving yeah so whatever your thought is on that person it's something internalized maybe think about what you think of this person yeah dreams whether being a bad person you probably think they're a bad person so maybe analyze that a little bit internally but don't don't hold it against them as if they've done the thing yeah it's your brain going give this guy a second for yeah not for the action in the dream yes maybe that's it maybe maybe i need to reframe this then maybe it's that you can let it ruin your day if something comes of it if you reanalyze a dream

and then you you maybe re-evaluate a situation in your life and also are all your friends saying that guy sucks does your mom not like him and now you're having dreams about him it might be your subconscious going you're not listening to everyone else i'm gonna fucking step in and sort this shit out but also it might just be like a low level anxiety again it's context but that's it maybe you've transposed someone in your life any decisions off what happens in a dream yes think about what's happening in the dream maybe if you're like focused on something repeatedly in your sleep or something have a think about it but don't act as if the dream was real exactly that's a good way to put it it's not it's not fixed event it's not

real none of it ever happened but it is a bit of a reflection it's a bit of you time yeah so think about it don't act it's like if you i don't know go have a bath and for no reason or input you suddenly become inexplicably mad at someone it's probably a bad person in your life yeah that's it it will always boil down to something a dream is something happening through all of the input you've given it yeah all of your thoughts have all come culminated to this so there's something going on it's kind of like imagine you're giving all your thoughts to chat gpt and it'll say what it says you having dreams is something significantly more powerful than chat gpt that you don't control the input on yeah it's everything you've ever

experienced is being put into it it's absolutely every single moment of your life goes into that but it's also like a weird outside slash inside force yeah you also you don't get to choose the prompt no it has all of your information from the day you were able to perceive information and then it just decides to play something for you and usually it's it's recency that it taps into you also still have a lot of things that are memory you mentioned their first place you worked that's sort of the the thing that plays on a lot of people like workplace it's a cliche but i think it probably is some version of it is real with the like naked in high school or naked when you do a test or yeah the embarrassing moment yeah being as vulnerable as you actually felt then yeah yeah

it transposes it to a physical situation yeah whereas at the time your brain isn't that smart i like how you described it as something much more powerful than chat gbt but also stupid correct yeah i mean i know my brain some pigeons can diagnose cancer chat gpt can't do that oh i don't that's a real by the way i know i know i don't think we can find a better um bookend for this common ground that pigeons can diagnose cancer and chat gpt can't pigeons can diagnose cancer whatever's happening in your brain is both important and also not important so bear that in mind we've added nothing

to this conversation all we've done is given you something else to dream about maybe we'll be in your dreams maybe we'll be

in your nightmares but one thing I can guarantee you is we will be in the deserts of your minds stay subtle humble and brave

and we'll catch you next time goodnight We'll be right back.