War With A Mate - Episode 66: Genuinely Awful Stuff & Sardonic Art

Episode Date: March 6, 2026

The gradual crawl through Turn Four continues, with a real switch-up in initiative - and very familiar weather. A mailbag hits a little close to home with today’s play and the history segment hits a little too hard (seriously, this one isn’t pleasant folks). Thank goodness we have Andy’s Common Ground that James can agree with, and not completely derail…?

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Because we have your number. H-O-T-T-O-G-O. The weather in Africa is hot to go. It's hot, hot, hot. It is. Welcome to What With A Mate with me, James. me andy and it is another bright sunny fall day as they called it in the game which is autumn for everyone else um it's hot hot weather again but this time it's special because i ruled it

yes well should we get into what happened because we started we finished off our well you finished off your truck stuff that's right we we finished some of the stuff that we had going on last time we played which feels like forever ago because we've had some some real ups and downs on the old war with a mate front these last few weeks between this recording issue but we're back we're back playing the campaign for north africa we're back having the the good old times that we have and then we play this game once a week as well but it's not being all that bad we did wrap up the trucks and my truck movement feels more structured than ever it's a shame that we're now in the the twilight of this scenario but hey good to saw out that's it i'd rather get it sorted

at some point before the full game it's just a shame it's far too little far too late my guys are starving my guys are thirsty as well because that hot weather that extra evaporation that's gonna fucking tear me apart it's rough so yeah we finished the tin uh i rolled up some repairs did you finish the upstage sorry yes finish the upstage uh the terms of phrase mean yes they are different things it's important uh yeah did you repair i've got some repairs going yeah i need to roll on the table next time we play for the result but i've got the things noted that i am repairing so we did that that's good we've i say we've i've supplied my guys you did yours last time the trucks i've supplied more airfields got some more supplies ferried off

towards the west got some more airfield supply that haven't been supplied very frequently yeah unfortunately i can't do anything with them until next upstage didn't kick in this turn but they've got the stuff this upstage i need to watch this regression um but yeah uh they come online next upstage so by the sounds of it you're getting a chunkier air force back they're gonna be they're gonna be chunkier they're gonna be chunkier they're gonna be the kit kat chunky of the Kit Kat Air Force world. The Air Force, of course, being Kit Kat. The ground force being an Oreo.

Okay, sure. I call it an Oreo because you've got sand on the bottom, which is the bottom layer of the biscuit. You've got the cream in the middle, which is people. Okay. Person cream. And then on the top, you've got more sand because it's blown everywhere because it's windy.

So is it one of those Not chocolate Oreos No it's chocolate Okay it's not the yellow ones No what are they I think just like plain Oreo have a crusted cream You're just describing a crusted cream

Which is up there as one of the better biscuits Bourbon cream thoughts I'm a fan Surprise I had them recently Way better Well not way better as good as I remember them being as a child which surprised me you know the pink wafers oh right i had a conversation about pink wafers the other day oh okay not a pink wafer fan i was watching one of those videos where it's

um you know it's like three foods you have to get rid of one yeah and it was it was chocolate digestives pink wafer or i think it was milky bar milky way milky way and i was like of course pink wafers going so it's an insane proposition that it would be anything else milky way what no you don't mean that you're just trying to be controversial on a microphone it's not that kind of podcast andy we're not here to make hot button political comments have you ever got a milky way not in like a selection box or something yeah really yeah i used to get the long double ones back when they back when it was value for money not anymore okay back in the day yeah the world's falling apart now you can't i don't remember the last time i bought a single chocolate bar on its

own where it wasn't part of a meal deal can you no exactly it's a good point you will be buying a standalone kinder bueno for me i will leisure maybe i'll sneak out and get it's part of a meal deal um i actually will forbid that you're not saving any coin on this okay if this is at all cost-effective, it sort of ruins the point. I want you to suffer for this. That's a nice thing for your friend to say. I want my Kinder Bueno with a side

of pound of flesh. Gross meal. It's kind of Mildi Lauer now. I usually get a plain ham sandwich, that's kind of my pound of flesh. I guess my £1.50 of flesh, because they're cheap on their own. It's barely a saving.

Yeah, you get one of the real sandwiches. If I want to really get a saving and I'll get the protein milkshake a protein chocolate bar and a ham sandwich because then I'm saving money on the other two expensive top shelf items your meal deal's terrible

my meal deal's great my meal deal is terrific it's terrible so good I'll sing a little song not right now though, I'll save that anyway, we're drifting we finished the turn, the off stage

and then i stopped saying it's the turn you're a liar that one was on you you're you're a fucking liar so anyway we finished the art stage uh and then i handed you the ball i said hey james it's your initiative you finally you take the lead buddy you finally got down on your knees and you said pretty pretty please james will you go first and i looked at you and for a moment i thought i don't know i feel sorry for this guy he owes me chocolate he's clearly losing at the game maybe i give him maybe i throw him one bone maybe i give him this one so i look down at you there on your knees why are you just okay and i patted you on the head and i went you know what all right kid i'll do this just this once what a horrible little fantasy you just had

and then you got up you sat down and you sat there on the edge of your seat going, go on Mr. James you can do it and then I rolled weather and I got hot weather and I think that whole thing you did on the knees and the ritual

whatever it was, it was to make sure I rolled hot weather you wanted to shift the blame onto me and that's not cool it's not what friends do friends go to Central Perk Andy i wish i wish i wish i could hang out in a coffee shop all day well we can't afford that no no one can it's expensive to live andy and you know what else

is expensive heat because it gets rid of my water and my fuel faster albeit not as bad as it gets rid of yours yours is burning up way quicker yeah because i don't have fucking jerry cans loser I'm the jerrycan chart don't describe yourself as the jerrycan chart I'm jerrychat nice to meet you that's a cool name

jerrychat's a pretty cool guy yeah you don't want to mess with jerrychat though jerrychat knows that ball is life basically I'm going to go past and go that guy knows ball so with the the hot weather aside from the uh the bad breakdown um and the the bad evaporation side of things it also means uh i didn't want to do any construction i don't want to mess around with

any of that sort of stuff so after we'd decided who was going first and we'd decided the weather or rather the dice did one and you did the other you in one situation being god the dice and the being god it's sort of a um polytheistic situation we've got going on here and yeah the the outcome of all of that is air combat air missions yeah we got there pretty quick because the weather as you said sort of stops you doing a lot of stuff it does and i decided to air on the side of caution with my air missions uh yeah just before we get to them uh my construction did finished i've undone some of the damage you've done on that north road yeah which is sort of that actually bleeds quite nicely into my air missions because while i was able to ferry some

supplies to my airfields the rest of which by the way went to supply dump one of course the one up along the north coast and also some to fort maddalena worth mentioning that actually i got some uh some supplies down there because i've got some planes there ready now that my sgsu have arrived there so i got my airs my airs in the air my i got my airs and the planes and my planes in the air and upon doing so realized i don't have a lot in the way of bombs going off here i had 25 planes and each of them had four bombs each okay not great so i had 100 bomb points exactly and i thought where shall i drop them and i figured well let's really commit to it let's commit to bombing the airfield at alexandria yes let's finally fight fire with fire let's take out some

of your air superiority which you now have with some of my planes so i targeted that and then we had to consult the rules because we thought that i'd selected an invalid target at first yes uh but we looked and it listed the things and it didn't include airfields yeah so there were two tiers of um of apprehension the first was when we looked at major cities being bombed if you bomb the the city the the fortification then you need to do it at night you can't actually do that during the day checks out but then we realized i'm not bombing the fortification i'm just bombing the things within yes and then there was another section with you can't bomb trucks yeah units supply dumps various other things now we found yeah that the case of the fortifications defend

only certain things they don't seem to defend airfields no which makes sense we discussed the logistics of this when we were playing you can't really fortify an airfield you can yeah you can put aa guns there but in terms of fortifying it's just a long flat piece of ground yeah you can't put a roof on that you can't hide it well i guess you can't hide that's the one thing you can do you can try and hide it you can't make it safer you probably can't do that as well this game's not very realistic they really missed the mark with the realism aspect of this game yeah they clearly winged it they've never oh airpun i like it um i'm trying to think of how i can shoehorn the word bird into this um it's not gonna work now i'll i'll circle around to it i will get there

like a bird in flight oh fuck you what why do that who does that we've been doing this so long and you think it's it's nice to make little snipey remarks like that to take my jokes well you could say it's all your chickens coming home to roost oh my god you know what you're a real you're a real dickhead didn't have a bit related insult did you no none that were like actually pointed just some quite soft ones and i felt like you needed to be i need you to know i'm angry well it doesn't affect me here up here on my ivory perch every perch come on now you're saying

things that aren't even turns of phrase i'm taking a classic turn of phrase and making it bird fiend ah a real wordsmith it's like watching shakespeare yeah i mean you would have loved to see him work and naysayers like you would have been like you're spelling all that shit wrong that's not a word lo and behold that would actually be what i would do yeah i would definitely criticize shakespeare back in the day yeah you would have pet on it's shakespeare i would have decried him and then he would have rose to superiority and i'd be dead by then though by the time i realize how big he's got i would be dead but it'd be remembered i'd be remembered more so as as the guy who's been the most wrong about language well if you think about you know

a lot of people remember jesus and a lot of people remember judas they did so i'd at least have a sort of judas-esque role within the shakespeare verse yeah he doesn't really have a canon or a rogues gallery yeah the shakespeare rogues gallery i guess the puritans yeah that's a good point i could be one of them which one did any of them have like robot arms or no they're aggressively boring they're fanatically boring i could do that that's what we're doing this is us preaching our sermon no we laugh too much they're very much everything must be gray and life should suck. We're laughing about that, though. We're laughing about our grey activity.

Yeah, we are the Andy Shakespeare. Andy Shakespeare? I'm Uncle Shakespeare. That's a throwback. It's a callback to a previous episode that we did. Episode 11. What a classic bit. Uncle Climax. I think that's the

episode. Anyway, we're drifting even further off topic. Yeah, this has been... But it's all game-centric. The game's in the middle, and we're circling around like birds of prey. Fuck, yes. Now we can move on. Now we can move on. Okay. Alright, cool.

So... I forgot what we were talking about. Yes, Alexandria. So, we determined in the end I can't actually bomb these airfields. So I did, and I dropped my bombs, and lo and behold, took off one of the airstrips. And 10% of the planes that are there. And it's a big airfield.

It is. So, that's a lot of planes taken out. I don't know how many exactly. I need to work it out exactly because I'm going to spread them because there's multiple SJSUs there. Do your squads cap out at 15 or 16? Because mine are 12. I think mine cap out at 15 and I can have 12 ready. Yeah, because I can have nine ready.

Nine or eight? Nine, I think it's nine. I should know that off the top of my head. so i've taken out definitely a comfortable number with that and that was a very small commitment of bombs i mean it's the only ones i've got so it's actually a big one but relative to what i could have if all my stuff was ready yeah you could go the full because you can do up to five on the airfields can't you i think so four or five yeah which is my power max out six is pretty bad and i can definitely commit enough bombs when i've got

all my air stuff ready to hit the the last few columns yeah all i really need to do and i realized this when we were playing and i had a moment of frustration over it was my airfields on map a right next to benghazi are just sat there to to rot at the moment because i've not been refueling them refilling them with resources because i've got no truck convoy that reliably operates around there yeah you need a sort of back line not quite like third second in that way but you need like a map a truck yeah because they could just zip around those airfields in benghazi and every single turn every single upstage i could resupply every single airfield to some extent yeah and i could do that every single upstage every single time i'm dropping a lot of bombs like yeah it

would have to be a fair few trucks to be able to resupply all the ammo i would need for those bombing runs but i mean the rewards are just insane and benghazi is one of your ports you get your shipments in right yeah it is for all intents and purposes if i'm using it just for the bombs unlimited supplies yeah so i need i need to get that sorted if not now in the main game yeah because i also i'm not able to do much damage to your convoys at the minute even if i can find them which i rarely can there's just not enough planes in malta to be like taking 50 or anything like that yeah you're not going to be doing any reasonable damage so i'm not yeah supply wise in terms of getting them to the theater is fine yeah that's never been the issue it's how i move

them around so i've tried to come to terms with that a little bit with my now structured truck convoys i still find myself lacking in certain areas but the air missions so i dropped the the bombs on your airfield that was all good and well i then ran a combat air patrol over supply dump one and the i think it's the fourth black shirt over that way yeah it is and that was ineffective ineffective in the sense of it was pointless yeah because i i did four missions against three hexes. I did a bombing slash strafing run against one of your truck convoys.

Yes. That ended up between the bombing and the strafing destroying five trucks. Yes. And then I also strafed the first Libyans and the second... Was it the second Blackshirts? Second Blackshirts.

Yeah. Their first conflict. Yeah. And I think they both lost one tow of infantry each. They did. The first Libyans lost one of their dwindling number of tow points. and the second Black Shirt's lost their very first.

It's their first wound in this battle. They finally arrived. They helped win me the scenario, but they have now taken their first blood, so they will be coming back with a vengeance. Which I guess is also, well, movements next, and it's you taking the lead, because I had a few reasons for it.

One, I was a bit like, I'm not sure what I want to do. Yes. And two, you've sort of moved back into a reactive position, so I'm going to make you be proactive. I guess put the strategy, like, bounce off, because I guess you could just be like, I'm passing the turn as it were, but I don't think you will. Well, that's it.

As soon as you said that it was me, I knew where that was coming from. I knew it was going to be a combination of uncertainty, sort of what is james doing with this move and also i guess to force my hand into showing you what i'm doing before you then need to react yes so will that influence what i'm doing yes absolutely um do i know exactly what i'm doing no do i have a bit of an idea as to what i'm doing i think so yeah there's another reason i'm doing it uh as well for this test game yeah it seemed a good opportunity to do it as well I want to get a sense of how

powerful the back to back is the back to back yeah yes that's a good point I don't feel like I'm going to benefit from this because this is my back to back right now which you didn't have time to prepare for yes I'm on the back foot of the back to back

yes and you also used the first leg of it to do a retreat so if you come forward I've done nothing yeah so which is why what i won't be doing is undoing that turn so that wasn't something i needed to do for the sake of their survivability for like this off stage for example that wasn't for that so i won't be undoing the turn i won't be ctrl z in this no however doesn't mean i won't

move some guys further forward but there is of course the risk that now i double down on this retreat in which case you now have a lot more ground to clear yeah because if i double down on this retreat you've you've now given me an upstage difference between us yeah but i guess i could flood in and take bardia you i don't think you could take bardia because if i if i continue that retreat i guess it depends where you draw the line yeah well it's definitely not going to be past bardia yeah i'll tell you that for free i'm busy working a bardia to get you evicted so your truck bandits are still in there certainly gonna happen this time yes so never reason as Well, there's actually...

Because they'd be attacking, which is much worse for survivability. Okay, yes. So might as well have a defensive one. Where you could possibly hold off. And then they'll probably die. In the attack round. But you won't be able to move in.

Yes, that's a good point. That's kind of frustrating. Yeah. I am interested to see how... Is it going to feel... I mean, there's obviously the air states, so there's more reactiveness. but is it going to almost feel like double

CPA, or is it like, I am very curious to see if this tempo thing is going to be a useful weapon. Yeah, you make a good point, because I could well see the benefit of that if I find a way to

double down and invest in this tactic of withdrawing and repositioning. If I now use that to do it again, I can't buy myself an upstage i give myself a buffer where at the moment if you were taking your goal right now your movement you could just undo what i've done by moving up yes i can engage the same amount yes whereas now if i move further again then your turn is on the back foot yes you could then use your second one to then also move and then fill that gap yeah but then you're just spending your

upstage running towards me and separating yourself further from your supply lines it feels like opening yourself up so yeah it's an interesting bit as well where i'm like high chance of overextending and the best part about this is it's hot weather yes so breakdowns are gonna go up so if i pull back even just a little bit more if you want to close that gap this is a bad time to be doing it because you're closing a gap over open desert yes it's a good point because it's the end

of the via balbo yes so if you want to start coming towards me now this is a really bad time and I can tell by the look on your face you haven't thought about that a bit but no I think it's I think it should work alright

but yeah there is the if i was like doing a charge to engage yes it would be a it would be a bloodbath yeah um not in the sense of i kill you just in the sense of you're going to start losing guys um yeah they could end up not being able to move if water or fuel they've locked off for too long which is my ideal situation your supply lines kill you i i mean that's also kind of mine is i do think a big part of it is because it is we've had like those big engagements where they've gone back and forth back and forth and like it's not getting rid of a division certainly like weakened it like the first libyans for example yeah they

they've absolutely shrunk it's insane i showed you the difference in the size of those tables earlier and seeing it go from the size it was to what it is now is just devastating yeah but that was like a lot of resources to invest in doing that damage whereas yeah if you can just isolate a division somewhere without supplies you've killed the division but you don't have to actually do the fighting yeah realistically all i need to do is kill your trucks yeah if i can find a way to make your trucks unavailable then your guys have got I mean, what you guys don't have

is enough ammo and resources to fight every single one of my divisions. No, not. So you can win a few fights. Yeah. But even if I just dig in and just have my guys stay in position and then slowly but surely have my divisions start to flank you while you're blocked by guys

who refuse to move. You can't fight your way through them. You can't saw your way out. Yeah, that's them not being able to than being able to stand their ground thing. Yes. It is pretty bad. So if you stay where you are now,

then I guess you're kind of safe, but you're not going to win the game doing that. No. So we found ourselves at a bit of an impasse with that, and I'm going to be thinking up what I can do because next week will be a really important one, deciding what I'm going to do with this bumper turn. I do have, I think...

start of an idea but it's one of those things where as soon as you do something that slightly throws the plan off it's not going to work yeah I mean I'm constantly walking into these with like I know what I'm going to do and then anything happens

and it's now I need to react to that I think I'm in an alright position still I'm not too worried nothing's going to happen terrible for the rest of turn four rest of turn four I'm safe yeah I'm not going to be like taking a C this turn

turn 5 turn 5 is dangerous turn 5 is going to be a mess and then it's the last one Andy yeah I mean the end of turn 5 might be a bit of a frenzy because depending where the front is it's far enough that

neither of us can get to the others yes so you might as well just throw the divisions in yeah i think i think when the um when the hammer comes down on the end of turn five and we do all of our store distribution for the start of turn six and we realize that this is now the end state of the game i think we will just have to clean it at that point there's nothing to lose no so i'm interested to see what that looks like but for now we've still got to keep our composure we've got to just be two two guys who pretend to know what they're doing boy are we pretending oh

we're good we're good at it though we really we really stick the landing on that one gameplay is well it plays itself at this point it's like clockwork we we don't even need to be there probably should be there yeah just keep an eye on things it's just a board game as well i suppose we need to we need to move the pieces and fill out the spreadsheets and stuff make the decisions do the game we should recruit more people do you ever think about going back on our word every every week you ever think about not doing this anymore every week you know what you know what i do look forward to yeah the end you know this is just done you do realize andy when when we get to the end of this game we don't have to

do this anymore this is the fun bit but all of it though like we don't have to like play this game anymore no recording episodes no no putting them out none of that like one day this ends it's far too early in the process for you to be excited or looking forward to that like blue sky thinking okay this ends at some point we're both alive yeah and we just don't have to do this anymore we just relax imagine that it'd be fun close your eyes for a moment close your eyes of course i was gonna open them oh what were you doing i was gonna get rid of alexandria just destroy the board i was gonna move all the pieces off and then put like a post-it note over it or something i'd definitely not be able to find it then i don't know man i've

seen you do some embarrassing things i think i could trick you you could probably trick me but not like that all right how could i trick you name i'm not gonna help you oh that's not very sportsmanlike no it isn't i agree i'm not being sporting well if if you're not being sporting then i don't want to talk to you right now so instead we're gonna we're gonna do a mailbag we're gonna we're gonna read out what the what the listeners have to say because we've done all of the the gameplay stuff so i i don't want to talk to you now so we'll talk separately we'll read the mailbags we'll just not interact with each other how does that sound that sounds fine i guess this is gonna need a real read a real common ground this week just me just me and you

guys listening now so i hope you're all having a good episode i'm sure andy's doing a fun thing on his side of the room as well but i have an email here from hugh and hugh's topic of the the subject of the email is another aussie writing in and it goes hey there y'all it's a good y'all i like a y'all another one of your apparently many australian viewers yes you are we do seem to have a bit of a bit of a bunch of those i've been binging your content over the last week or to around when episode 60 came out and loving it i've been pondering why so many australians are watching me too maybe you can fill me in on this hugh i'm looking for this insight yeah whatever that noise was one of the who interrupts an email so one of the reasons there are so many of us

is we love good british humor i think it reminds us of our heritage but i think the bigger reason is the North African Campaign is the main theatre where Australia fought during World War II. We also fought, as my grandparents did, in the Pacific Theatre, but many of our most famous groups fought in North Africa, most notably the Rats of Tobruk and the

Scrap Iron Flotilla, both of whom I would most certainly recommend for a future history segment. I shall let Andy know. They're on the list. While I'm at it, rude, a question. The Rats of Tobruk

held the city against Rommel's attack for nine months, roughly 40 game terms. How are sieges reflected in the game rules, and is it reasonable for a group to hold a single city against a complete siege for that long a time? Furthermore, since supply problems and the threat of losing divisions would be so present in a siege, would a siege actually ever be likely to happen, or would it be better as a tactical decision to allow a city to fall once there was a threat of encirclement. Thanks for reading, and stay subtle, humble, and brave. Reporting in from the deserts of your minds,

Hugh. Well, Hugh, thank you. That's good. You really could have warned yourself back over there, Arnie, by laughing at that one. That would have got you right back into the good books. Didn't work. Right, well, either way, I will have to

defer to some of your, I guess, perspective on this one, because we do have a siege going on right now. we do right now in bardia you're holding off against a siege in my city yes with my trucks i don't know whose notification that was someone got a notification now someone's laptop's about to die so your truck bandits they've been holding off a fair while now it's been what three op stages yeah they yeah they darted in yeah and they're turn three so that is a good reflection of how long you can last and i think part of it is down to the way attrition of forces works

in the losses when you're in close assault the the losses that you sustain are percentage which means until you get real low down you're never going to be losing the remainder of everything you have to really whittle down a group before that becomes a viable situation so your men are able to hold off that rule that we found fairly recently in which you can refuse to retreat and take an extra 10 percent loss means that you can realistically hold off as long as you want or as long as the percentages allow that and the cities have fortification levels as well which helps defend against things like barrage yeah they and it's quite significant it's like several columns which is like in bomb points like three or four which is like 40 odd

yeah it's a lot it's a big impact from fortifications yeah so being in a city it means that you are you're kind of all right in if all you want to do is survive then you're good also if i set up i think you could hold it as well if for a longer term thing and i had more people there you could set up like airlifting and um supply by sea um which you can't really block off yeah as the opposing so you could in theory i think hold a siege for a very long time Well, especially when it's Bardia, because I've already got a lot of supplies there. If it was somewhere like Tobruk, it's actually a port.

Yes. So at that point, it's supplies on tap for me. Or if I took it, I could Commonwealth shipping. Yes. Like, I mean, if you can grab a hold of a port, or even better, a port with an airfield, you can hold out for a long time. As well as that, if you've only got a relatively small force,

And depending on what you're consuming when you're in combat, you don't even burn through your supplies particularly quick. No. Bearing in mind, stores are only consumed once per turn. Water, yes, is supplied regularly, but it'll have a well. So it's unlimited water at these settlements as well. So water you don't need to worry about. Fuel you won't be using much of, if any, because you're stationary.

So it is really just ammo and stores. Yeah, you don't really need much else. I also I can see sieges happening not like a siege on one hex but I could see a situation where like the city and the hexes around it yes where it's not as direct a siege on like fortifications and stuff but it's a siege on a dug in position like I could see us having a siege that you know the half a pass yes that's that's a good position actually yeah because that's right next to a few burrs and villages but also it's a good geographical spot it kind of gives you access from the coast area to the desert area on map c yes it is a like a bit of a nexus of all the

different environment because there's almost like three different areas that branch off from there you've got the road coming up north you've got the tracks coming down south and then also the tracks going directly west and east as well you know if you're not counting the position you're coming from yeah it is a crossroad so i think sieges will probably be uncommon when they happen like the one at bardia is just because of the complete clusterfuck that is your truck bandits sneaking in there but it's not going to be as common i think for forces to get in there because i think if there's a siege it means that the wall of one side has pushed all the way to that i think that becomes the sort of the furthest point the siege is sort of the front yes um yeah i can't

really see it going any other way i can't i can't envision a siege in a settlement where that isn't the end of the front. I could kind of see it sort of with what happened to Brooke in the game where there's like a big pocket of resistance somewhere. You put enough guys to stop them like breaking out. Yes. And then you move. Cause they just,

they just sort of besieged to Brooke with enough guys to keep them in there. And Rommel sent the rest of his guys. So I think you could have sieges like that, where you're just holding a chunk yeah you're trying to keep them in place rather than trying to take the location yeah it's sort of it'll be nice to take the city but i'm also very happy that wherever the front is whatever you've contributed to this siege in terms of units and also resupplying yeah like ideal scenario for me i guess on the flip side of that is right now where

your guys are sort of pushed up against the border of Map C, if I managed to snake behind them and I start sieging Mersa Matruh, that would be incredible. That would be very, very big for you, yeah. Because at that point, I've locked down your supply line, and also the front is still present

further west, but I've locked down that area. So I don't think, going back to the question that Hugh raised, I don't think I would ever see abandoning the city as an immediate option like it doesn't stand out as being the better way to do anything i think there's

definitely going to be a tactical moment where maybe running away leaving that place to the dogs is a viable choice but i don't think it stands head and shoulders above the rest as a good idea i think it would have to be a fairly niche one because if you want to keep that location keeping it is very easy taking stuff is yes if you've got a dug in force those garrisons that I've got at Bardia and Tobruk. If I keep them there and then you come knocking, it's a fucking nightmare for you. Yeah, well, the one

you took out of Bardia had like, was it 15 guns or something? I think it's 9. Yeah, that sounds... 9 or 10 guns. It's just insane levels of barrage points. Yeah, which you can also just go nuts with in a city, because you've got

a thousand ammo and a supply dump. Yeah, if it's Tobruk, it's unlimited, practically. The amount of ammo that comes in i can't use it in a single turn yeah so i will just be churning through that absolutely blasting anything that comes to the door so i can't really see a situation where i would ever leave to brook if that garrison was there you'd have to you'd have to kick me out i would never leave yeah which does make me feel confident when it comes to defend in that area certainly with garrisons i could see maybe being like i'll pull

oh yeah i'd pull out like a like a bunch of guys there like if i had a division station there i'd pull them out and go do other stuff but having a garrison like that is so worthwhile so yeah that i think um answers the the questions hugh but very well raised and at a good point because we've been looking at fortification rules today for the air stuff so very well timed that we well I suppose you've sent it a little while ago. We picked it up. This one's on us. Good job.

Good job, us. Nice one, us. Yeah. And you know what? I think for that, Andy, maybe we can talk. You and I. I think that was good by us. An assist from Hugh, but primarily us that did that.

Okay. We should start writing our own emails. That's such a smart idea. No. But I do have one. that i wrote oh perfect what's this one under the alias martin that's what you call yourself yeah hi andy and james uh i learned about your project and podcast yesterday 26th of january 2026 and immediately binged 11 episodes it's impressive yeah i have hobbies and things to do

i swear i just listened to everything on double speed i decided to write in now as i'm sitting in mcdonald's eating the saddest meal because you two keep mentioning that you still haven't received any emails well i hope it changes over the course of 50 episodes i have you let to yet to listen to but if not hi i'm listening i heard about uh sbi campaign for north africa at some point in the past but wasn't aware of how much of a clusterfuck of a game it is still from now on thanks to you guys i'll be able to deploy sbi trivia to my normie friends doing during uh dnd and board game nights i'm excited to eventually catch up thanks for that martin uh it's always gives me a smile when we receive uh emails from people running into the us begging for emails

phase yeah it was early on um i think the the the funny thing is as well when that's been mentioned there is that oh you've missed a part off the email as well andy oh the sorry the subject line is private pervert reporters yeah and also the ps uh ps email title refers to a joke in episode 11 that maybe your listeners don't want to be called perverts but i don't mind i'm kind of a pervert i did miss that i guess i guess if you're saying that you wrote this and i see why you're trying to to shy away from taking responsibility but if you're a pervert and you just say it no also being a pervert satin mcdonald's hmm i don't know i feel like there's uh there's some sort of precedent to that also is there also i just he said episode 11 that's

uncle climax that's the joke i just made earlier we also picked this email this is the this episode as the spiritual successor to episode 11 we made a sequel andy yeah uh martin you might want to be careful not just from the pervert side of things but also the way that we got started on this is at our dnd session our friend told us about the campaign for north africa so be very aware that you might talk to your friends about this and they might start playing it forever that is the transmission vector yeah that that's that's how this thing spreads yes it's podcast born so if you uh if you spread it it's a it's an auditory plague so you gotta be careful with that it's a plague that devours four six hours of your week

yeah uh sometimes more if you get the chance it's terminal as well it will last forever it will shorten your lifespan this game can't be doing anything good for my lifespan no no what what it's doing is increasing my screen time it's making me i'm i'm gonna get some sort of spinal issues because of the way i sit when i'm playing the game and i just think psychologically it's not gonna help me be all there in my older age i'm gonna be remembering a war that i wasn't there for what a horrible glimpse into our future hunched over unable to remember anything but the campaign for north africa a war that ended a hundred years ago it's it's not good but i i would say in terms of binging that means martin is now

caught up yeah if you keep that trajectory he's actually way ahead of us tell us what it's like martin let us know what happens i don't feel like martin is subject to linear time he seems like a fifth dimensional kind of guy i've got my impression from the email guy's a fifth dimensional pervert yeah and thankfully you know if he's fifth dimensional he won't be attacking fascist italians you only do that in the fourth dimension yes the anyone who attacks them comes from the fourth dimension the desert the sand the mountains they get attacked from anywhere. Space, maybe?

One day. In one of the sequels, do you mean World War III? Or any of the other World Wars. Yeah, we'll tick off World War III first. I'm sure that's a long way off. Yeah, it's definitely not.

Basically, what's happening now isn't the equivalent Abyssinian crisis we've been covering. nothing like life imitating art imitating life yes well I'm sure it'll all work out, maybe

what a message of hope that's not what we're here for, Arnie we're here to deliver funny hijinks about a board game about a war that's long gone so we'll focus on the war that's done that's our wheelhouse that's our speciality and if anyone wants to get in touch with us

to share their thoughts on our speciality or your speciality, or anyone's speciality, or just anything really, we'll read anything so fire it over, the email address is info at warwithamate.co.uk the website is warwithamate.co.uk and the Instagram is

just warwithamate we take messages on all of them we've got a web form on the website, it works sometimes we're not masters of technology I mean if you were here for the whole delay the other week with the audio thing, we don't know what we're fucking doing with this podcast thing which makes it all the funnier that we do have a live show coming up which is in birmingham 30th of may at the uk games expo so if you go to the uk games expo

tag along to that it'll be time to be confirmed we we don't know the time exactly yet but we'll confirm that it'll be good come along we'll talk about the game uh we'll we'll be there and Maybe we'll bring props. Maybe we'll bring fireworks. Yep, just had an email. It's been cancelled. We're not allowed to bring fireworks. We can't have wrestling-style pyro for our entrance.

To the organisers of the UK Games Expo, we promise we won't bring pyrotechnics. Please don't cancel the show. But, they can definitely hear that. I can't edit that out. I don't know how to edit it properly. No, it'll be fine.

we'll just bring our wacky selves we're we're fiery enough andy aren't we yeah we're explosive we're real powder kegs in the podcast industry we're real hot rods hot shots up-and-comers movers and shakers and speaking of movers and shakers andy i believe you've got a history segment about some individuals who really moved and shook the world with some of their actions that's a wild intro to what i'm about to talk about but let's get to it the men of the long-range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to cairo from a most trip the contrast between the east and west of the nile is very marked in the east at this point i gave little thought to my past but i'd always be interested in the sea

we are absolutely not qualified to share views on history well andy please um whatever you're about to drop on us let's hope that my introductory tone of whimsy maybe softens the blow of whatever's about to come based on the little preview you gave last time special sprayers were installed on board aircraft so they could vaporize over vast areas of territory a fine death dealing rain groups of 9 15 or 18 aircraft followed one another so that the fog issued from them in a continuous sheet it was thus that as from the end of january 1936 soldiers women children cattle rivers lakes and pastures were drenched continually in this deadly rain. It's a quote

from Haile Selassie to the UN. I'm sorry. I've misread the room. Yeah. Because we're going to be getting into some of the war crimes from this conflict. Alright, okay. Oh well, at least

it's a nice... Okay. I'm just going to have to take this one. This isn't going to be a pleasant one, is it? Yeah. Okay, let's let's learn horrible things okay so a general we'll get into some italian gas use but i'm gonna lay a general groundwork of what's going on in this conflict okay um so to start with um the ethiopians uh had a tradition at this time of castrating defeated enemies and taking body

parts as trophies right okay that's intense yeah hundreds of italian colonial troops from eritrea and dozens of italians experienced this uh fate many of them alive oh yeah the italians themselves also quickly adopted a no prisoners policy first as an unwritten rule but later as an official rule when in may 1936 mussolini gave the order to graziani all rebels taken prisoner must be shot all right i get i mean the only i say no i'm not going to say positive it's not i guess at least it's shot and not something worse i guess yeah i'm trying to take the winds where i can here because it's horrible yeah this isn't a great one but uh yeah it's should be talked about uh so the italian narrative on this whole thing um they have a couple of

justifications uh one of the main ones uh for them using gas was the death of an italian airman tito minatini who due to engine troubles landed behind enemy lines on the 26th of december uh 1935 tito and the other man in the plane survived the crash uh what happens next is disputed but the two men ultimately died the italian claims the two pilots were defending themselves uh but sergeant livio was killed at the site then tito uh was captured and tortured to death by the ethiopian army oh not going to go into too many details here but it's a bad death and these reports come out um from an egyptian red cross worker the italians use this as a justification for their chemical weapon use and another one is the use of dum-dum bullets

which not as fun as they sound they're made from softer material so that they expand on impact and cause bigger wounds oh i'm not our gun fans might be able to correct me i think they're like early versions of hollow point bullets that's what came to mind yeah yeah which are if i remember rightly currently banned in the geneva convention and these were banned under the hate convention yeah i think i'm pretty sure you're not allowed hollow point rounds no i think they're because they're specific for causing over injury yes yeah um so back to these airmen while the two men died their bodies were discovered 200 meters away from the wreckage of the aircraft after the war the cause of death could not be determined the ethiopian sent a messenger to graziani claiming

that the men were killed by locals angered by the bombing bombings and invasion but they weren't ethiopian troops uh graziani arrested the messenger and did not reply i mean he hasn't heard the turn of phrase then has he no the boss of the egyptian red cross war worker denies his employees report however he's in egypt at the time two other uh workers on the scene back up the account i think it's likely they did happen i don't know if the army were involved but it seems like yeah these guys did die rough deaths if i mean the thing is to use that as justification for chemical warfare yeah yet both but it could well be that both sides here have been real yes shits about it but i think the escalation of that regardless of the fact that this has been

a horrible death i don't know that this could ever justify well it doesn't i'm not going to say I don't know. It doesn't justify chemical warfare. There's not any fence sitting about that. That's just wrong. Yeah. Yeah, but I just want to... It's nasty all around. It's not a...

Now it's clear that both sides are willing to get very brutal with it. This isn't just clean cut, kill the enemy. It's getting... It's going over the top now. They're overreacting. Yeah. So after that happens, Grazio

Arnie orders leaflets to be dropped by airplane saying you have beheaded one of our airmen infringing all human and international laws under which prisoners are sacred and deserve respect you will get what you deserve Graziani he shot the messenger

he's putting prisoners they're killing prisoners it's deeply hypocritical from them so that's mainly the Italian narrative to this but the timeline doesn't make sense so as we've talked about italy over the preceding decade have transported hundreds of tons of gas to eritrea yeah i remember we waxed

about this a little bit previously yeah they have too much of the chemical here yes they can't have just had that on the back of this revelation they had this already yeah they also used the gas before the 26th of december with some reports being as early as uh early october which is before this happens yeah so unless the fuckers are clairvoyant then yeah yeah that doesn't add up they're not martin who's in the fifth dimension no so on the 27th of october 1935 uh mussolini sent a message to his excellency graziani the use of gas as an ultima ratio to overwhelm enemy resistance and in case of counter-attack is authorized. Ultima

ratio is like in terms of last resort or like the worst situation. Yeah. But that order also says if they counter-attack. You can't preemptively get ready for the worst case scenario. Yeah, but also if you're starting a war with people, they

will counter-attack you. Yeah, that's how that works. Then it's not a war. You're invading their country. If they don't counter-attack, that's not a war. Yeah, you can't invade somewhere If they fight back, they'll use chemical weapons Yeah, so my reading of that is He's put the ultimate ratio thing in there

But the end of it Is just, I'll go for it And then on the 28th, he sends to Bagoglio Given the enemy system I have authorized Your Excellency to use Even on a vast scale

Any gas and flamethrowers Which is two days after this incident where it's like you have the gas there this is your like for the international community to justify it yeah this is this is about optics at this point yeah they've started employing it already and now they've got a reason massive air quotes to start deploying it yes and deploy it on a vast scale they will uh this is a continuation of the starting quote in order more surely to poisoned the waters and pastures the italian command made its aircraft pass over and over again these fiendful attacks succeeded men and animals succumbed the deadly rain that fell from

the aircraft made all of those whom it touched fly shrieking with pain all those who drank poisoned water or ate infected food also succumbed in dreadful suffering with tens of thousands of victims of italian mustard gas so they used gas from planes they also used it in bombs and aerosols from planes and they also put it in artillery shells so wherever they're attacking it's it's just rife with mustard gas now yes and also this other kind of gas i found out about uh also known as mask breaker this is specifically designed where the particles are small enough to get through the filters of gas masks and it makes you compulsively sneeze and vomit so you have to take the mask off oh so they fire this stuff into like positions and then the mustard gas so yeah

so they've got a gas that makes a gas mask completely dysfunctional and then the gas is the gas mask would protect you from which is like worse you can't have the mask if you're putting measures in place to allow for your other chemical weapon to be used by using a chemical weapon you're you're fucked you've committed to this chemical weapon thing you're you're doing like multiple steps to get to the chemical warfare like sorry i say chemical warfare that makes it sound like there's some sort of like chemical retaliation you're using chemical weapons against a force yes not just force uh the general population as well they're infecting the food with it the water supply you can't when you get a water supply you're no longer able to contain

the spread of that no it just seeps out into now it's it's going to be whoever drinks from that you can't have any sort of discernible idea as to who it is that you've killed with this no it's it's just a fire and that's like that's not yeah humane that's so yeah as well as that they're using mustard gas primarily which is known as the king of chemical agents because it's easy to produce low cost predictable persistent and can cause resource devouring casualties rather than fatalities it gets its name from both its uh yellow color and also the smell oh i don't know the smell yeah i also saw in world war one before the name got like solidified it also got called garlic gas okay yeah it causes blistering on exposed skin severe damage to the eyes and which

can result in blindness and if you inhale it it does damage to all your internal tissues uh so the lungs uh there's no antidote or product protective chemical you can use at all the only way to avoid it is by covering the skin mouth and nose so if you've been exposed there's no like put this on to nullify it yeah so you can't yeah there's no preventative measure there's no yeah so when you say protect the skin as well so just expose skin any exposed skin will burn or blister oh god and the ethiopians as well are wearing they don't have enough gas masks and they're wearing a lot of tribal clothing like loose for the heat well that's it the climate is going to be perfect for gas to seep in through well you've come right on to the next point which

is great horrible one of the scariest elements is after exposure it can take several hours to set in uh so you can just be exposed and then there's no antidote or anything but you just know it's coming oh no i hate that yeah just the impending dread of i've been exposed to this when am i going to start coughing up blood when when my skin gonna blister and here's another bit when you mentioned the climate being bad one it's worse the hotter it is like the chemical reactions have more energy it's just the hotter the temperature the worse this is like a prime climate to start using something like this if you want it to be bad yes and also under 13 degrees it's inactive like completely inane from what i could see it's primarily inactive which means oh during the night

when you yeah you drop it at night and nothing happens you drop it it covers people's skin it covers their clothes people can have it on them and then go inside and then it heats up and then they inadvertently gas the room oh like this is a horrible and they use it against soldiers civilians bodies of water grazing lands a specific incident just to tell you how much they're using gas this happened the what i'm about to talk about happens in 1939 three years after the war ends This is when they're fighting rebels in an occupation, not a war. There's 3,000 to 5,500 Ethiopian resistance fighters hiding in a cave system.

The Italians can't get them out, so they dissemble a bomb into 12 barrels and roll it in and then use artillery to blow it up and then just block the mouth of the cave for like a day. The locals call this the Cave of the Devil, and the land around it is still not cultivated even though it's fertile land because they prefer the land of

blood they're doing this as well, this isn't even the war, this is, at this point they own, own, in quotes Ethiopia so they're using that as a controlling measure, like an anti-rebel thing yeah, it's

it's crowd control yeah, the figures the Ethiopian government give for this whole thing is 382,000 civilian deaths caused by the invasion, 18,000 in direct bombing, 35,000 are sent to concentration

camps, because while all this is happening, they also have two concentration camps set up. Cool, so they really want to cover all areas. Every area of being. The evil scale. Yes. Nice. Destroy half a million homes, and then

6 million cattle, and seven million sheep and goats which leads to a bunch of deaths later on and sorry to get grim here as well but it's all of grim uh you know i mentioned they end its slavery yeah so you have half a million homes are gone 13 000 livestock are gone and you've got the countryside filling with people with no means to like support themselves yes displaced former slaves yeah and then being like so that even if it was

just the slavery thing it would be an economic crisis and then all this is happening yeah so

number of deaths took just gas around a hundred thousand from the gas alone just gas the idea of a

hundred thousand people dying through those means yeah whether it's in that like a media

I was thinking as well if it's in the water water the the temperature of that water typically if it's if there's chemical settling in it would it be the case of if you drink the water it's inactive yes you can body yeah or it could enter fish oh and then whatever and it enters the supply chain also a problem is it can get worked into the soil apparently and it's colder deeper down and then you could have people coming along years later and like digging it up to grow crops and it just so like that's another thing

they're trying to conquer this country to add it to that like yeah that that's why you can also tell it's a pure propaganda empire because what they're doing is meaning it will never be a it can't be a functional part of their empire for a long time well there's no way for it to be from you were talking about it the other time um where they were destroying the homes they were going through and just destroying villages as they pass through yeah that is that was already counterintuitive for invasion but now they're also salting the earth yeah with mustard gas so and again they can't control that and if it gets into water supplies if it gets into soil they don't have any say over that they can't undo that and it lingers like lingers for do we know

how long it lingers for like it depends i i'm not sure i think it depends on the heat but i think it's if it's gets into an environment where it's not gonna rise above that temperature it can persist for like a long time uh all right i don't think it's around now yeah so in any like huge amount it's still there but yeah this wasn't just to be morbid i wanted to highlight the actions of italian and also this is a direct consequence of the failure of the league of nations like britain france they share some culpability and responsibility in this i think yeah from everything you said the attempted appeasement and the the hands-off nature of this has just opened the the floodgates for an opportunity of scale of cruelty that's just really kind of

unfathomable and also it's one of the last big failures and dominoes of the legal nations to world to world war two and it proves like oh they're not they're not gonna step in and do this stuff like a lot of what happens here is what gives hitler the sort of go ahead to go into the rhineland and austria and stuff because they didn't do anything um and unfortunately this will become one of the first failures of the League of Nations as well. In a 1946 war crime commission,

no one was ever prosecuted for their part in any of this. So this one was just shrugged off then? Yes, and do you want to know one of the reasons why? Go on, I know I'll hear it. Graziani didn't

get done for this. He did briefly go to prison for his collaboration with the Nazis, but was never charged for this uh and baggy uh pediglio um who was the other general in charge of this um he didn't get prosecuted because he was helping the allies keep stability in italy after the war and they wanted italy to be a threat uh ally against the potential threat of communism so that's what they did this time round that's what the first thing was yes it was to be allies against the nazis yes so they did the exact same thing with the same guy yeah it's not already i presume played a part in world war

two as well yes so this guy played a part in this where they went well we'll let him get off with this one because he'll help against the nazis and then presumably joined with the nazis yeah fought alongside them and then afterwards is helping with with the provision of oh well maybe he'll help against communism yeah it's not even learning from history it's learning from recent events depending on who's involved it's learning from your own your own yes your own error in judgment yeah it's the whole fool me one situation but with massive consequences of people have died from chemical warfare as you fucking morons yeah that's insane that's genuinely insane yeah so i just want to end with one last quote from

Haile Selassie here. Throughout history, it has been the inaction of those who could have acted, the indifference of those who should have known better, the silence of the voice of justice when it mattered most, that has made it possible for evil to triumph. Well,

at least those words don't ring true now, eh? Yeah. Sorry for a bit of a bummer. You know what? These these history segments do go through these unfortunate peaks of wacky stories where you can kind of poke fun at these strange characters who are doing strange things nearly 100 years ago and usually it's in high stakes and quite bleak situations but you can kind of find the

the kind of whimsy amongst it all it's like well yeah it was war but you can sometimes dissociate from the horrible stuff yeah and make it a bit of a spectacle kind of like watching a like a war movie and it's like well yeah this horrible thing happened but i i want to i want to sink my teeth into the exciting side of it yeah but then there is the flip side of it where the reality is stuff like this happened yeah there's mass tragedy there's failings of humanity just a lack of any sort of moral conscience or soul in the actions taken by some people and the fact that it's either justified or forgotten that's the thing as well i didn't know i didn't know i'd heard of the abyssinian crisis and respect to it like affecting the lead-up to world war one in a

very broad sense but i never got any other like this detailed stuff and like with libya yeah didn't know the libyan genocide existed until i researched graziani it's like it's insane that these have been forgotten also by the way ethiopia still hasn't been paid any reparations italy played something like 100 million to russia 90 million to austria and something like five billion to libya in the like 90s early 2000s yeah ethiopia nothing no ethiopia no got ignored in the un and as well as that of course the nazis would look at that situation and go well if they're ignoring this they'll ignore anything yeah like it's not a wild leap for them to be like we're not gonna get done for the holocaust yeah because they they'd been

happening yeah they had concentration camps they had chemical weapons they they went to i mean more or less as extreme as you can really go in terms of mass cruelty yeah and by the sounds of it there was never anything done about it gotta appease them yeah apparently apparently so yeah well that was a heavy one if everyone's still listening thanks for sticking by with that one that was a rough one

that was a rough one I mean it's important it's one of those things where I do know occasionally a history segment will start to come up and I'll be a horrible one but I do want to learn about it because while I'm playing this board game we're doing a fun thing

I do want to learn and I can't just learn the funny stories no kind of have to know the full thing if you want to give it the the weight that it has the respect that it deserves so it's horrible but it needs to it needs to be known needs to be said but we can something a bit lighter we can now thankfully that we've learned that everyone who's still here if you're clutching your hands over your ears the bad stuff's bad stuff's gone for now we've we've learned we can reflect trigger warning at the start of history i don't know like maybe i feel like there might yeah maybe we should put something at the start of that and just kind of go this this one's this one's horrible yeah maybe we should do it for the

serious ones like i know they're all serious obviously but the ones where it gets particularly heavy yeah where we can't really even interject with a little bit of lightness no oh yeah i think that's probably a good thing yeah we'll put a little little marker on for the heavy ones because i i've if i was listening to a podcast yeah and when last week was very goofy and then yeah it's a bit whiplashy especially if you're pinching we'll put them on for the serious ones that's a good idea i like that andy we will not put on i don't know maybe it depends on how the common ground goes we won't put a content warning on for the common ground because this could be this could be anything

I think this one will be fine, I think you'll probably agree pretty quickly alright, that's good, that's what we need I mean, I've stopped talking to you partway through this episode and now you've just told me one of the most harrowing things I've ever heard about so, it's gotta be a good one

so, we'll use common ground this chance to come together and this week it's your suggestion of a common ground yes so, lay it on me 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 yeah leave authors alone, inner specifically like be happy for what they've given you but like

people need to be better at like not feeling entitled or like when they're like want for the thing overshadows what's actually happened like george rr martin's a good example whereas at a certain point they're like give us the next book like you're being lazy has like affected the like discourse of the series and also it's like yeah it would be good to get another one often but like we aren't actually entitled like you can't chain someone with their desk and be like write two thousand page books you're not feeling and like george rr martin's one obviously patrick roffis i don't know if you know him but he's another one wrote two excellent books but

has had like a long protracted weight and now every time you see him mentioned it's like where's the book you know what yeah i i don't mind this one at all this is one i i do agree with because you get that in a lot of different mediums yeah another example i thought of half-life 3 yes very good which i actually think potentially the amount of bullshit they got about that might have made them not want to work on it yeah well what it does surely is well i say surely i know it does because i've seen instances of it is when it builds up to a certain point you can never live up to the expectation no after a while it doesn't matter what you put out there it will not be good enough well another one brandon sanderson who seems to release

like three 800 page books a year or whatever yeah i remember you talking to me about this yeah one day he'll slow down and release like a 700 page book a year which is still significantly more than any other author and there'll be a section of his fan base that'll be like why isn't he doing that like why isn't he providing us as much stuff yeah you know you can't win like the dresden files series i love there's like 20 of them now and he used to again be releasing like one of them a year but then i'll slow down but it's like he's written 20 books in just this series and books in other series

so he's releasing once every few years now instead of once a year that's still very impressive hang on hang on a minute I see what you're doing what am I doing? you're trying to undermine the accountability tool

oh no I'm not you are, that's exactly what you're doing you son of a bitch because we put out the podcast as an accountability tool to make sure we finish the game. Yeah, authors don't release books as accountability tools so they keep writing.

It doesn't matter. This is a different thing from... No, it's not. You're trying to pick at the fucking threads here, man. You can't do that. You're not allowed to do this. If we rely on people feeling entitled

to another episode, if we throw that out the window, then this whole thing falls apart we can't fundamentally agree on this one okay you have to disagree well leave the authors alone podcasters are with significantly less respect than authors hound them at the ends of the earth no you know what i thought this was going to be a very easy open and shut kate i had so many examples i was about to agree with you on i had like i had bands in mind film franchises i had expectations not being met before i had

like great case studies i could have thrown at you there it was going to be a great conversation however i'm sorry what we have to do instead is i'm now going to convince you that this is a terrible idea so why shouldn't people feel entitled andy i think people should be you know you get really into something it's kind of like uh it's like a big thank you it's like give us more of this oh we we hate you oh we're gonna burn down your house you lazy bastard you need know give us this new thing that's lovely that's like that's like love that's not love it's such it's like appreciation that's gone too far no no it stopped being a nice thing it it would only go too far if like if anything bad happened like if if someone got like hurt

just no yeah so okay so so put it this way so and you're that's that's i'll take you to another world you don't have to close your eyes this time because i don't think you trust me so you you're an accomplished writer okay you've written you've written a series of four books so far okay and you've clearly set up the narrative there's going to be another one it's going to be great your book is widely beloved it's praised, it's made you rich as well, you're rich

in this situation and now people want the next one they love it, they love your work but you're not going to give it to them you're not going to do that for them I'll write another one but it's when it becomes this dog pile

give us the next book, you're taking too long we deserve this now in this situation though you are taking too long so what do you do then I guess I guess you've hounded me too much I'm not gonna

release the book I'm gonna write it but not release it that's the worst of both worlds what a horrible man you are in this world okay how about this every time someone asks me where the new book is i'm going to delay the release by a day okay no because then trolls are gonna then you're letting the trolls win i'm not going to tell them the book's just going to be longer and longer and not going to be wire is it because someone will find out someone will find out your rule and then the

trolls will weaponize that and they'll masquerade as true fans and they'll they'll push your book back and then you're letting fans you know be robbed of this the trolls you're biting off your nose to spite your face yeah so you're but they've already made me rich

in this situation though in this world the money is mostly gone now then the new books coming out then why did you take so long because I was spending all our money

what did you buy holidays non-productive holidays oh so you got nothing to show for no where did you go was it anywhere don't even remember somewhere hot somewhere cold i think i was on a train at one point were you just like just blitzed the whole time just drunk off your mind Yeah, I got an inter-railing card and a bottle of whiskey and then I woke up six weeks late Sorry, I just need to try and do the maths on this

You're rich and you spend all of your fortune inter-railing How long How long have you been gone? No wonder it took so long Yeah, that one's on me You've been snow-piercing your own life

You've been on a train for the last 17 years Drunk. That guy snow-pierced it himself. That's a horrible life. This is why these authors need to be releasing stuff. Because what happens when they spend all their money on ender-railing? It never ends well.

What are they going to do then? George R.R. Martin, he's on his way to Croatia right now. well split's lovely this time of year well leave out a split get back home and write that fucking book I haven't read the Game of Thrones books no me neither his writing style isn't for me

yeah I tried to read them a few times and then bounced off them yeah there's something about it that just doesn't really gel with my reading style left to right yeah no that's just how I read

books but yeah, I think because I want to agree with you. I want to agree with you. Yeah, then you can. But again, so what if we make a deal here?

Can we not just say that podcasters aren't artists, they're content producers? You can get up on your high heels about content. If there's any outcome of this that ends with me not calling myself an artist, then no bueno.

see this is a problem because i've encountered your ego yeah see now what you've got to tackle is is both logic and my hubris and what i'm doing is fundamentally incompatible what i'm doing is it's it's it's incredibly sophisticated it's it's like a post-irony machiavellian scheme okay it's so i don't i don't think people even understand what we're doing at its core i don't think you do because if you if you just listen to it episode by episode it's just a podcast but if you look at it further away and really just take it in it's kind of art it's beautiful i guess we'll agree on that that it's art the podcast is art the podcast is art and if if someone wants you to do something you should have to do it that that's just how art works it's just the podcast is art we'll agree on

that i'll take that i'll take that the podcast is art and you'll i don't know maybe you'll understand it one day maybe you won't talking to myself yeah i know oh god we're we're talented we are that we're talented and you know what else we are Andy so humble and brave damn right we are and everyone else you stay that way get in touch with us the email address is info at warwithamate.co.uk

the Instagram is just warwithamate and the website is warwithamate.co.uk get in touch let us know what you want to have us read about and wax about in the various topics that we cover game related or not and

see you in Birmingham come along to the live show it'll be a jolly good time we'll talk about our art maybe I'll bring some I'll bring some paintings for you all you can all have a look at my paintings that I can't do and according to your logic if you don't bring the paintings

well you have to bring the paintings because they're entitled to them you are entitled to my paintings you're entitled to my art I owe it to you in the deserts of my minds is where my art will stay and these are the deserts of my minds

thanks for listening yeah bye We'll be right back.