War With A Mate - Episode 81: Last Chance Saloon

Episode Date: June 20, 2026

The penultimate turn is over, and all tang stands between Andy and James and the full game is Turn Six. A very hard fought series of battle in the conclusion of the Land Movement leaves the theatre in an uncertain state, with both sides taking losses tactically and psychologically. The Mailbag unravels some questionable purchases, the History Segment reveals a fatal flaw in naval development and the guys accidentally stumble across the most wholesome Common Ground to date.

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Because we have your number. Hello, everybody. It's War With A Mate with me, James. Me, Andy. The podcast in which we play the campaign for North Africa, as long as that may be and whatever perils come our way during it. It is

a long board game. If you're here, you've probably heard of it. We are near the end of our practice scenario. Yes, we closed out turn 5 today. Turn 5 is over which means there is only

one turn left. Turn 6. For everyone keeping track at home. Before the end of the practice scenario that's it and then when that's done we'll play the full game all 111 turns we mean it this hasn't been a joke all the way up to now we've we've just been getting ready for it and this is episode 81 we've been playing since about episode 15 so it's taken a while yeah and we've got faster but looking at how today's session went it was my land movement and it took a while it was about four hours yeah it was an involved you moved a lot of stuff around

and also we had quite a few fights so yeah it was a we did it was a hefty session without any rule clarifications this time no we just got them wrong without realizing no i think we did we can't say that we didn't get anything wrong um i guess initial thoughts andy how are you feeling because last week you were all over the place you were you were really frustrated with the game fortunately i've been able to set myself over the last week how are you feeling you know what uh my my sardonic uh approach last week has somewhat softened i think going away and looking at the situation i'm in the rules that i've been getting the grips of over the last 18 months i think it was it was very frustrating in the moment it really it really got to me and

i i still think it's justified to be annoyed at this game however i've i've spun around on a bit more of a positive viewpoint because i had a lot more autonomy this week and that autonomy me meant i was able to do stuff whereas last week it was all based around me having one reaction because it was on the back of your movement when i couldn't do that i i spiraled a little bit a little a little just a smudge uh a hair that's the word and this week it felt better i don't forgive the game but i do feel like i'm i'm in i'm on level footing with the game now of course why would you forgive the game it did nothing wrong right don't defend the game it doesn't need defenders campaign for north africa apologist someone's got to do it no no one has to do it

it's inanimate it's cardboard it's lots of cardboard i mean we all know it's more than that don't get deep don't get philosophical and poetic with me it's a long game it's in picture frames in your living room with metal sheets behind it you know what else goes in picture frames high art and like drivel and this sits I'll say somewhere between I'm still

I struggle to say it's art much better than you would have been last week the commentary on it however I would say is art what we're doing it's beautiful I mean it has no purpose other than itself which I guess is a definition of art

that's true it's unique that's not a definition i don't think it's not a definition but it makes i guess it's a selling point if you bought art and you're like hang on i've seen this one before if i painted mona lisa too or just another mona lisa and just called it something else you'd be pretty pissed off i wouldn't be angry if if you were into art and i peddled it to you i was like look at this this is if i was in the art and someone came to me with a picture of a woman i'd be like no leonardo did that no but it's specifically one portrait of a woman one landscape it's specifically meant to be

the because you got lots of podcasts about board games as well this is different though okay it's like if i painted like if if leonardo da vinci painted the most difficult woman in history and who would you think the most difficult woman in history is let's name and shame shall we i'm not gonna i'm not gonna pick that out on the podcast there's people who are difficult in everyone's lives everyone probably has a different answer to that it's not for me to say or choose expertly sidestepped i'm not going to name and shame a one woman and say they're the most difficult woman ever that's not for me to decide what i can decide though because i do have much more of a soapbox to stand on is what is the most difficult board game it's the campaign for north

africa sure difficult not in the ins and outs of the rules they're vast i got lost in them lost amongst a maze of them it's meant to be confusing it's not complicated and today i think was a nice snapshot of that because we got a lot done there was a lot of land combat but it actually boiled down to playing a game rather than figuring out rule mechanics yeah all of today felt like tactical decision based on the back of your tactical decision that's fair yeah first and foremost well done to you thank you because you have boxed me into a really difficult situation moving around today was a a nightmare i think it's actually the catalyst for what went wrong last week because i was in such a bad position that me trying to figure out those rules hinged

on the small things i could do the few options i had and when they started to fall apart i panicked it went all right for you though today when i think about as well as it could have dice roll forgiving yeah so we started off with my movement on the back of the i guess uh pretty destructive turn that you had you you did some real damage yeah i hit some of your divisions hard didn't get much positioning wise but yeah yeah positioning not so much but you don't really need positioning when the road ahead is now clear so i had to counter that so i decided to redistribute the location of my men i'd build along a wall and that that wall had been present for a good turn now i've been using that as the

infrastructure for all of my turns it's maintain the wall stop your advance after your devastating hits on my guys last time on your turn of the upstage i decided best thing to do is be the aggressor yeah it's the advice i've had from the start from all of the advice that we'd have uh whether it's from the echoes of war guys in episode three whether it's from people who send in emails it's always been go on the offensive as the italians it's also called graziani's offensive it is although he wasn't particularly offensive so no fair i guess he was offensive to uh cultures nations sensibilities human nature

just our species probably God I do reckon that there's definitely moral arguments for him being an affront to God but I've not read enough of the script to understand and he died being like I'm happy to go to God

which also frustrated the shit out of me yeah you shouldn't it is kind of a flip off at the last minute I'll go see God now It's just I nailed this. No, you nailed being a real piece of work. Yeah.

That's being generous. What a dickhead. Yeah. I'm not going to sidestep that one. Tell them what you really feel. Yeah. You hear that, Graziani? I don't like you.

I'm representing your movements in this game, and I'm doing better than you. Yes, I may have starved countless more men than you did. No, you certainly didn't. Sorry. You certainly starved less people than him. That's a good point, actually. you know what i can always go home and sleep tight with that that knowledge maybe we shouldn't

be drawing direct comparisons between you and grassy yeah i don't want to find one that's like close i don't think i could but i don't want to check so on the back of your horrendously aggressive movement i i went aggressive and that aggression took the form of motorizing two of my divisions and speeding them off towards you yeah so and we've got a picture of this which will come out on the instagram alongside the episode we well i decided to move the second libyan division into bardia and fully motorized them i moved the 64th mamassia division and i fully motorized them i moved the 62nd division i didn't motorize them i just put them straight up along the Who have I been fighting?

Australian? New Zealand The second New Zealand Went up against the Kiwis Thankfully the 28th Maori weren't there So I didn't have to be as terrified So everyone wasn't killed So I wasn't killed and traumatised

In the process Instead what I did was move the 62nd along The track, they just walked over there After motorising the 64th I sped them along so i had them next to each other both adjacent to the new zealand guys yep combat commenced it did yeah in amongst that combat i inflicted 15 losses on you yep which is pretty comfortable i took a pretty hefty hit of 25 yeah i said uh i had a real babe roof cola shot moment there

where i just went it's 11 then i just rolled an 11 yes which is the the ideal role in close assault you get 11 it's the best way it can go the interesting thing about this combat was that the combat differential worked out as zero it was flat yes for that one uh you had a bigger bigger group of guys but my the morale is so good morale is such an equalizer i had i committed 125 raw strength i think for that one i did you said 99 yes for the first one yeah so you committed 99 i committed 125 zero so worked out i lost 25 you lost 15 i still have the majority after that so i still have the the the advantage if you will and it's it's close in amongst that we barraged as well i pinned one of your guys you pinned one of mine yes so that also was to be factored in got a

low percentage run off on my case yeah you fired off a bit of a scatter shot yeah i went off with two pretty big barrages of seven points each which is a lot 70 barrage yeah i pumped in a lot uh i used my um the 62nd and 64th and once upon a time the 63rd before they got decimated last time have a lot of guns and those guns have really good barrage ratings yeah i've noticed you and i've been doing the like selection when you get to pick from like uh air bombing or pinning in combat you seem to have a lot of guys with five guns in seems to be almost like the template and some of those guns i've got multiple two points and they've got like nine barrage rating yeah oh so you've got i think you've got nine is better than any of my barrages that i think

possibly i think the highest i've got is in the seventh and it's got eight yeah i've got i've got um i've got nines i've got sixes and i've got some fives those are the the values across my guys yeah nine six five i've got quite a lot of sixes six is still really good yeah but you have to same as every other combat value you have to divide it by 10 in the end to get the the actual so it means you really have to stack those points up so my three that are on nine really it's only three barrage points three actual yeah if i've got like three toe point of those so barraged had the combat zero differential that was with a i had a flat morale because of a good roll on the cohesion and you had plus three yep so three and then with the differentials they were both divisions

so all in all you'd lose 15 i lose 25 fair enough second bite at the cherry i attack again same guys same position you weren't forced to retreat so we go at it again this time the differential i believe swung in my favor i think it was plus it was plus one yeah swung round i lost nothing and i think i lost five five percent on your end zero on mine yeah you did have to retreat i nailed the retreat so you were pushed back a hex so that was that was good i i took that in my stride with you being pushed back a hex i decided to go for a bit of a different tactic i moved the 62nd 64th to follow you and the second libyan who were motorized what they had done earlier is they moved along the escarpment but they went north of it so around the area that

the 63rd fell into when they were pushed over the edge last time so i had them snake up and they came up along what was now a slope because you were previously butted up against an escarpment hexite yes but that retreat forced you against a slope hexite the difference between the two is pretty significant instead of a plus sorry instead of it being a six difference there's three difference on escarpment it's a two difference yeah which is it's one it's one column that's still important especially with it being columns because some of the the middle tends to be i think it's four to four like plus minus is there one but then later it goes into like two or three numbers per column yeah and the terrain moves you columns which means it can be a really big boost

so i was pretty pleased with that boxing you in i thought the second libyan division are pretty spic and span and the 64th have used up quite a bit of ammo that cohesion was still all right because they managed to push you and they were motorized yeah so they got plus three cohesion from pushing you on they were motorized already so when it came to tackling you there i thought these two divisions boxing you in this will go well not as well as i thought so in that fight it came down to a bit of a messy situation because it was actually negative on the modifier for me yeah because weirdly because you pinned last time even though i had losses the fight, I had a bigger

actual score than I had the fight before. Yeah, it worked out at like, what, like plus, sorry, minus three? Yeah. But you rolled poorly. So I took 0% again. Yes. Very pleased about that. I took off

15%, I believe? Yes. Which I'm happy with. Boxed you in, shot at you, all good. And then I decide well i took zero losses so what i'll do since this whole plan was to try and push you a little bit and also disrupt your supply line i moved the 64th in a bold push to your supply dump yes you did now that was difficult because that pushed them over cohesion that meant that they ended up on minus five cohesion then they had a fight there they went up against the minus 10

overall yeah um some of the some of the combat units so they were butted up against your sixth australian cavalry i think it was the sixth australian cavalry the 11th for sars and the first chi which are from the fourth indian yeah so that was a bit of a showdown that ended up flat again yes for all the differentials minus four for me because of the morale difference plus three to you minus one to me and then on top of that we had the messy situation of division size you were battalions i was a division so that's a plus four to me yes becomes flat and then we committed the five yeah the same size because that was um because that was just one of my divisions and that was what's left after the big slug

yeah with the new zealand so that that panned out all right because i did some damage to you five percent yes which knocked off one of them which i was pretty happy with so the 11 for sars because they were down at one toe because they were my truck bandits for a bit and then they rejoined with the seventh yes that was it i knew they came from somewhere bastards so that meant zero percent for me five percent for you i'm happy with that i break them off and i position them in a bit of a precarious zone and i've now cast a net not the instrument not a cast a net i've cast a net around that area because your guys are kind of boxed in kind of yeah it's a very loose net there are occasional gaps but for the most part any direction you you go between the seventh armored

and the second new zealand they will touch a zone of control yes or an escarpment so i've got them boxed in quite nicely the plan was to make sure none of your trucks could get to them but i had to make a decision when i broke off the 64th from that engagement it was to determine whether or not i stopped trucks getting to the second or the seventh i chose to block the second i did not realize however the gap was big enough in the middle that if you get them to the seventh they can go to the second from there yes which is exactly what they did in your truck movement which i guess if you put them in the other way and bought the seventh they would have just gone it's the same i guess yeah it's a sort of six and two frees for some reason i hadn't computed

the fact that that gap in the middle works as a bit of a pathway between the two so unfortunately that meant your trucks did get where they needed to go but i did have some more movement that went on that was moving my recon guys who broke off the the very frustrating situation i had last week the recon guys that broke off that i was going to have speed over to your supply dump they were broken off and i sped them around instead to the the road up from the escarpment to the east yes which means i've cut off a bit of a choke point so if you want to get your trucks up that way they'll have to pass through there yeah or the more likely situation you're going to send the is it the indian division fourth indian yep you're going to send them up and

you're going to destroy my recon they're in city barania yeah yeah they're gonna that i know what you're trying to sidestep this they're going to destroy my recon guys maybe someone is going to destroying my recon guys i'd be shocked if they're not touched by this i don't know because it's a very i've created an awkward three road for your trucks i feel like if you want to get your trucks around they kind of have to go really out that way to circumvent that recon group i yeah the thing is i'm feeling good about supplies now like really good about it for ammo yeah even after all that yeah that's impressive but this is you must have churned through a lot of ammo in that fight uh the second new zealand used i think it was 70 overall yes that's a lot but

this is also a fact of we're doing a 16 scenario this would not be applicable in the main game in anyway but they didn't need to get any stores moved because i'd done it in op stage two and three right so you've been bolstering them with ammo for this last turn yeah because it's not a sustainable thing but because it ends in a turn i can just be like well you have all the stores and probably fuel and water you need for the rest of the game yeah i'm fine for fuel them water yeah ammo i've taken a bit of a battering but i did some rejigging of that at the end um stores are dicey however i did assess today so for some more context when i've motorized my guys in bardia that meant removing my three big convoys yes i've condensed all of that down into

just motorizing those guys with a few spare trucks but they've been attached to them as well so that meant i've i've got no big convoys anymore yeah apart from the one that usually supplies map b's airfields now map b is covered in sandstorm yes so in my truck movement i decided to just zip them along and resupply some ammo for the guys on that front line and then pop them back to bardia rather than going back to dubruque yeah used up pretty much all of their movement and i lost 25 and breakdown which is costly but it is kind of last chance to loon here yeah so with that i was fairly confident to bolster bardia i moved my first libyan division and i also moved the oreska regiment so they're up there as well that made me feel comfortable with

bardia's position because i've got a division in there i've got the regiment garrisoning that it's fortified level two fortified level two so pushing them out it's going to be a nightmare for you yeah and they've also they've got loads of units around them surrounding that place it's not even like i i can just put guys on them because if i do i just leave the entire map open and i'm probably not going to get through them yeah you'd have to somehow get through the wall to get there in the first place and to brooks also fortified it's got two of the black shirt groups in there so i'm comfortable with yeah i don't think i'm taking to brook so the only other movement i did was to move the fourth black shirts down to the southwest a

little bit to cut off a bit of a crossroads just north of madalena yeah so all in all the wall is maintained i've i've inflicted some losses that i'm comfortable with i'm happy with those used quite a bit of ammo but i've used my truck convoy in a bit of a different way i've kind of accepted that the only planes I'll be using are going to be the ones on map A for the rest of the scenario. Oh, so you're sort of mid-range. Well, they're bombers, so they're...

Yeah. And mid-range is map C. Oh, I was thinking mid-range would be map B. You'd be, like, ignoring those guys. Oh, yeah, I can hit map B still pretty comfortably. I can't really do anything on map A, but I don't really care to. Sorry, not map A.

I can't really do anything on map D. Yeah. so i can i can attack your guys on the the front line with my bombers that's all i really need i've used up my convoys they're gone so the game state now is i've got two more motorized divisions i've got ammo to that area i've held the line and i fortify the line in a more aggressive stance and i also now have two divisions on the downside of the escarpment yes down on uh close at the coast yes one of which is motorized yeah so all in all i am pleased with this i'm i'm happy with where i am it's not where i would have wanted to be if i had to

tell myself what turn five would look like but it is way better than i thought it would have been when you started attacking me at the start of this upstage yeah no you're in i feel like we're fairly even i think we you you've definitely got the advantage when it comes to making offensive movement but i think i can hold out long enough to stay out the practice scenario yes i don't think i need to worry about you hitting a win condition no i don't think so um and that's that's what i'm trying to prevent i'm trying to prevent a win condition i think there is no i don't maybe i don't know i'll see over the next i think the issue is you would have to have siwa which i think you could realistically take siwa yes you would also need to have bardia which

is less real that's the sticking point that's what i'm making sure to defend i don't think you can get to bardia i think i've disrupted your supplies enough that i can continue to batter you with more attacks and i might be able to wear down your ammo to the point where you can't sustain the attack all the way to bardia yeah not with all of the guys you'd have to fight no at the moment I think, looking at this, if I had to make a prediction for the end of the game, end of this practice scenario, I think I

hold my previous winning position, which we sort of agreed is the pseudo-win condition, that I hit a win condition, held it for an upstage, and move on past that. I don't think you'll find one. I think I will be able to hold this.

We'll just see where Bardia will be. See where Bardia and city barani was what i needed i don't know if it's different for you i think it will be i'll probably need something from your side that's almost my equivalent to city barani it might be like salem or something yeah maybe hellfire pass yes possibly that's one of them i'm not sure if that's the tactical strategic or decisive i think you could take that i think because hellfire pass is on the border of the escarpment yeah and i've got some guys there

but it's mostly my garrisons from Bardia and Tobruk so it's a lot of guns so I think I could keep you pinned there for a while and hold you off but I don't know that I can stop you over the course of three op stages from breaking that line so you could take that

but after that you have to take Bardia yeah so that's my prediction, how do you feel? Do you think you might be able to pull something out the bag at the end here? Potentially i can take siwa that's fine siwa's fine because it's undefended i know for a fact if you march your guys to siwa you'll you'll just take it you've got some guys down there who could

i've got a garrison in a town and they're starving oh they're just fucked yeah cool so i can take siwa next upstage that's fine which gives me three upstages to focus everything on Bardia yes so holding Bardia is my main concern keeping an eye on Tobruk just in case is another one

because I don't think you're going to leave it alone if you see that Bardia is not going to break it's more of if you have to relieve Tobruk if you have to take people out of Tobruk to relieve Bardia that's when I might look at it because at the minute

is it two divisions? One of them is a division. One of them is smaller. Yeah, it's just stacking point-wise. The third black shirt, I think, rankers a three on their card. Oh, okay. Which is not a regiment.

Maybe it is a regiment. Yeah, I think regiment. Yeah. Possibly. Whatever it is, it's a three on the stacking point value. I don't actually think the names are that useful for it because even on the table, it does it for

stacking point rather than Yeah, and three is I think what they're at, but they're sizable. Yeah. What they do have, a lot of guns. Yes. And if they're in a fortified position and they're just barraging the shit out of you with unlimited ammo, which

is what Tobruk effectively is given the amount of time we have left they could barrage you with everything they have over and over and it wouldn't make a dent in the supplies I have there. So i think end of turn five one turn to go i'm glad that both of us feel like there's still game to be played there's still a horse in the race because if there wasn't this would kind of

feel like a bit of a going out with a whimper rather than a bang yeah i think also this is like this is a good time to be trying stuff out. Sort of high stakes in terms of the game state, but low stakes in terms of what's probably going to be done in like 10 sessions.

And this is what I wanted to try. I wanted to try a hard, aggressive approach to see how it balances out. And after today, I now have an idea that two divisions up against one of yours,

realistically, it's probably going to end up being an even fight. just so you've got it the second aren't a full division at the minute well that's worse then they're missing an HQ

with like the infantry that includes the 28th Maori what I do know though is that the 7th started off weaker because don't the 7th start off just scattered all over the place so if I just rush the seven from go if you can try and like isolate the seventh while it's in little pieces

that's a huge a huge one and i think i might be able to tear them apart a bit in the main game because they're the like they're the anvil for i guess the first well operation compass of first 20 terms yeah if i can break them early no i think they well yeah they stay around a bit and then obviously they got we did a series on but yeah um but i'm i'm happy going into turn six i think we we're giving it a send off that it should have which is going to be more fights and hopefully more fights yeah hopefully a bit of an explosive conclusion and all for that kinder bueno what two kinder buenos we doubled down yes so we've got two it's more than two more than two well perrin gave us a four pack

Oh are we using those as prize as well I think I'll also buy one So it's not So you'll get five I guess I also like that you said you'll buy one Because that means you've just given up That you believe that you've lost I guess more

If I lose I will buy one And then you also get the four Freudian slip Remember we have to get the bueno from The vending machine at Durham train station So that's going to be an expensive window. To be fair, it's not actually that expensive

to get the train, you know. Oh, isn't it one stop? It's not very many. There's definitely a train that goes direct to Durham. Oh yeah, so they just kick you off at the next stop if you haven't bought a ticket. Right, I wouldn't do that because I think they also fine you.

I don't think you just get a free ride and they're like, oh, get off here. Don't do that again. Otherwise people would always just not buy a ticket if they're going one stop i've based something my conception of reality on a tv show again i've just realized which one uh you know when jeremy goes up to follow dobby and mark uh when mark's gonna tell and then the ticket inspector comes and is like uh oh do you not have a ticket he's like no he's like you have to get off then he's like i was just going there

anyway see you you thought you'd take the the jeremy from pete show i'll take his lead yeah that's a horrible i mean yeah he becomes a life coach later on in the show but uh can you aspire to more yes god i hope so have bigger dreams than being a deadbeat in a show about two hopeless people so yeah the buenos are on the line it's it's a toss-up but i do like the idea of using the gifted buenos we got at the live show from Perrin as because it's a reward for the winner but there is a bit of a penalty

to the loss so I think yeah that's an interesting thing then for the buying of the buenos do we just send the loser off on their own yeah do we both go together or do we just send the loser on a solo trip

I mean the loser just has to sort it out well we need proof oh they have to yeah provide a picture of them at the vending machine here's the thing you could actually buy the bueno from somewhere else you just have to take a photo of yourself in front of that vending machine so you might as well buy it from there what would be my favorite outcome of the situation is you lose of course you get the train to durham there's no bueno in the machine so i can't you have to go back on multiple trips no i have to run out into durham find a corner

shop buy a bueno and then post a caption like i bought the last one well no no actually even better than that i'm gonna come along with you okay so we're both going to durham and if it's the case that there's none in that machine by retreat rules in the campaign for north africa you have to retreat to the nearest supply dump so then you have to wander into durham and find the nearest bueno and if there's none in that shop you have to continue on but you have to check every single shop that sells confectionery yeah until you find the kinder bueno yeah that's that would be my ideal outcome okay i push you on in a march through durham it becomes the campaign for central durham well there we go now i've got something to really

inspire me making you wander through durham until you find a kinder bueno at a certain point it'll be a given i mean they have i feel like every shop they're not they're like i feel like if you're starting a corner shop and you're like we need 10 chocolate bars they're in it they have to be they're great yeah and then we also have the four bonus ones from perrin which is great yes so there we go we have five buenos on the line and based on the current rate of play we've we've been gifted a four pack of bonus buenos in the 18 months we've been playing so over the next 58 yes we'll be gifted dozens of hot three-course meals for the full scenario that would be that would be fantastic although there is something that is something i would like although there

is something a bit more disappointing about going to a live show for example and someone shows up they're like i brought you a hot three-course meal which i guess would have had to be cooked at some point earlier so we've just got i guess leftovers delivered to us at a live show which you have to eat a lot faster that's still awesome i mean yeah i guess you you have a different desire from this that's a nice home-cooked meal going home well you heard it here folks if you uh if you run into andy in the wild bring him bring him a three-course meal in tupperware i will not accept two or four courses sorry you won't accept more courses i've asked for free don't fucking snub that kind of generosity so yeah you wouldn't have like the sort of um like appetizer

starter and then main and dessert i might go appetizer start at main or start a main dessert it's it's dealer's choice on the free courses i would drop the dessert personally same but it's up to the person making me this lavish meal i think dessert's overrated maybe that'll be a common ground one day that's i've i used to be all about desserts but now i very rarely get one and you matured yeah well that's that that's uh that's it we moved our trucks um like i say i that's that's my trick movement described your trick movement andy uh so i wove up that little path we mentioned uh so i was able to supply the seventh and the second uh new zealand um two of my mercer mature convoys went to the two guys who were nearby who'd gone to chase the

second black shirts after their like lunge yes yeah rest in peace yeah um one came from mercer mature and one just stayed at city borani so it's a it's a fairly good spread no more trucks to alexandria i don't think that's interesting maybe just stronghold of supplies yeah i think i well the train is also a pipeline so it does water for me yes i guess you've got that so there's basically as long as that gets broke uh merciful true hasn't limited water which means it just needs to do fuel and ammo at this point but it's pretty nicely oh i should have moved the second further along and touched onto the railroad and it would have you would have had to move guys further back in order to then take it yeah oh man that would have

been good yeah because that railroad is your westernmost guy easternmost guys but not it don't have to be touching the railroad i think it's just the easternmost i think i have to hit the railroad oh okay i don't think it's just like i don't think it's like offside rule in football i think i actually have to be on the railroad okay otherwise i guess in theory i could just have guys start at siwa and just dart along the desert along the bottom and then it's like why the fuck can't they use the railroad hundreds of miles to the north because we've got to deal with this there's guys all the way down there in siwa there's guys dying in the deep desert we cannot run the trains as a moral standpoint it would be wrong for us to use this to supply water

to our men it would be unfair and uncouth sometimes it's difficult being the good guys i wouldn't know historically i'm the bad guys but that is that's turn five that's what it looks like hell of a turn you know what it's got ups and downs war isn't easy and i'll take the good with the bad frustrated last week tentative about where it's going this week but definitely positive after a game session that once again felt like a game that i understood yep i love when i understand what i'm doing so now all that's left is to bombard turn six with as much casualty and chaos as we can to see out the end of this practice scenario and i need to conquer benghazi i mean you can give it a jolly good go but benghazi is a fucking it's so long way away and i've got guys

on a road that takes me straight there yeah what i don't want to do is fall for a feint on your part where you make it look like you go to benghazi i send my guys from to brook and then you just nip into to brook but i can move everybody within those three cities very quickly but what we can't do is move people if they don't tell us that they've been moved and that's what you will do you tell us that you've been moved that you've been inspired or that you're listening to our podcast which is the thing we'd most likely expect if you email us and that's what we're going to find out about right now we're going to delve into the mailbag and see what emails you've written with your keyboards deep in the mailbag we have found an email from monty

and monty says advertisement purchases good afternoon y'all i just finished episode 74 where you talk about the advertisement and whether or not people purchase from them i have never purchased anything advertised to be online certainly not anything that was suggested by amazon but you need to keep in mind that these style of advertisements aren't targeted towards a certain group of people of which the three of us are included uh you also play the campaign for north africa raymondi i see an exclusive group the uh there are people out there who will genuinely purchase anything that catches their eye if it is put in front of them think of the stereotype of old grannies sitting at their tv and purchasing items from the adverts the ones that say limited

time only or call now for our exclusive deal i think there's another modern version of that as well i've noticed which is the people who seem to have like a tremendous amount of like crap in their house from uh the tiktok shop or teamu or one of them yeah now i used to be victim to this i don't know if you remember andy when we lived together and i used to use the app wish yes now i had a bit of a troubling relationship with that app because i bought a leather jacket from there for i think it was four pounds fifty that was a really good leather jacket then it was like i have never obviously but it lasted forever i still have that jacket yeah and we lived together that was our second flat that we had together

and that was that must be like 7 or 8 years ago now 7 years ago second one would have been 7 years ago longer than that yeah yeah because we moved in together in 2017 so 2018 would have been the second flat

moved in together when I was 20 yeah so 9 years ago wow cool that's a bit of my law that I didn't realise yeah jesus well i've got that with this place when i'm like how long have i been here because i moved into her in covid so it's just like a lot of null time yeah i always forget about that that

we moved out of our place together in covid when i different different ways and then yeah i think we like it was between the first and second lockdown i think we like that brief window when you could actually do stuff yeah we used it to move that's wild yeah that's so i i bought a a leather jacket from there which i i still have now and yeah it's a bit tattered and worn now but it looks cool actually with the sort of like tattered worn look and it's it's a fucking brilliant jacket fits perfectly i love it still have that thing now and i will not get rid of it and i thought well that showed up that was great i'll buy some other stuff so something else like a spider-man suit yeah that's what i was gonna get to so yes that is so we so i go to the halloween

night out in in town every year you love a halloween night i love a halloween night out um which we will actually mention something to do with that in a sec um a podcast related thing um so i i thought well i'll get a spider-man costume that'll be cool so i bought the spider-man three venom spider-man costume but the sizing chart i i either misread or it was just a lie because said you got a medium yeah and i'm not i'm like a i'm a medium or it could be a small based on my build in some places like i'm a i'm a slender guy especially then yeah so i i put this thing on and it zips all the way up the back and i tried to zip myself i remember i was in the i was in the hallway yeah into our flat and i remember zipping it up to my head and immediately

panicking because i was stuck hunched over in a position where i could no longer unzip it essentially forced you into the fetal position i was in some sort of spider-man cocoon it feels like it was a medium from like the 11th century when no one had nutrition and everyone was like four foot ten like i i was i i had to like sort of tense my body and like push outward with my back to pop the zip off the top near my head in order to escape it must have been a medium for like a medium under 13 it's like do you have a husky 10 year old is your is your 10 year old ripped because you'll love even then it wouldn't have felt like it doesn't make any sense so yeah i i have fallen for that i also bought uh face masks for covid from wish and that was in january

of 2020 i was ahead of the curve i actually i'm now just thinking i did recently make a purchase based off seeing stuff on the internet yeah what was it uh you know that thing you just clamp it down and it chops vegetables oh is that any good i nearly bought one the other day like it does like chips and stuff you put like a potato anything in it it just dices it yeah is it good it's awesome it saves does it actually just work as advertised yeah because stuff like that i see it and i'm like that's too convenient because i kept seeing it on like food youtubers yeah i get that on well tiktok i see on tiktok it'll come up halfway through a scroll but that wasn't i guess i did get advertised but i didn't buy a brand because there's enough of the yeah you see the

idea and you're like well i want one of those yeah where can i find generic potato slicer yeah but honestly as far as kitchen gadgets go i'd say that's that air fryer and i want to get a rice cooker next and those i think are the three so what we've done now is we've started to advertise products to other people yes so this becomes a third line of advertisement where people if someone buys it now we're talking about people being susceptible to silly adverts i think unfortunately you said uh people out there uh which we're not in the group of i think we we're discovering us do at least are in the group yeah monty unless you've bought a uh very convenient vegetable slicer or a very mis-sized spider-man costume we are not the same people

we there's actually no overlap these two venn diagram it's two circles so uh sorry for disappointing you there monday yeah you gave us too much credit i also think this undermines everything i said in that comment round i think i've just uh yeah i've undercut myself massively um the second time a second thing is a time where i did end up purchasing slash enrolling with a service okay we're fine with you if we we jumped okay we jumped right there not because of the advertisement but because when i needed it i had already been advertised about it a lot i used to use spectrum for internet in my apartment but they were consistently horrible several times every day the internet would just drop and i would have to turn the router off and

back on again eventually i got so irritated by this i cancelled with them though they keep hounding me for payment a month after i'd already cancelled here here monday i've had that with utilities so many times they want their router back that one was oh yeah yeah that was another thing when we moved out yeah my place where they kept on calling me asking to speak with you saying that they hadn't had the device returned which they had yeah the guy picked it up the guy showed up in his van but it was during covid so we had to leave it on the front step and then he came up and got it yeah and i think they just didn't register or log whatever that yeah i remember very distinctly because the guy was a real piece of work because he called us up earlier on on the

day and it was covid he's like look i'm gonna be around like 10 a.m 11 a.m we're like all right and then he called it's like look i'm gonna be here earlier we're like okay that's fine and he's like yeah you need to make sure you're in though it's like yeah it's covid we'll be in yeah it's a lockdown and he was like yeah just let me know what time you'll be free it's like right you've given us a you've said you'll be here just come anywhere in that time we'll be there i'm legally not allowed to not be is this a trap is this like some sort of like government like entrapment scheme where you you catch people and he picked it up and then yeah they said they didn't receive it yeah so that guy just got a free route i think they have to

activate it so i don't know how that works um and how to get a new internet provider at the walmart by my house there were frequently people standing near the electronic section advertising frontier another internet provider so i gave them a try and they've been perfect for the two years i've been with them i guess shout out frontier okay we're now advertising frontier if you're listening to us uh by all means get in touch we'd be happy to have you we've only heard good things the funny thing though is i still get the little plastic advertisements that go over the door handle showing up in my apartment and i'm just surprised they don't have notes about the fact i already have service here oh frontier don't get in touch with us you've got bad bookkeeping

also just that's he's just casually mentioned something which i'm guessing is an american thing of them putting a thing over your door handle i guess so yeah we don't have that i know it makes me think of like a hotel whether you're like that's exactly what i thought yeah that's the first thing i thought of with that that's interesting we get like like every time i come to yours and i open the door there's always like a flyer here because you live in like such a massively advertised heavy area for some reason well i live near two no i live near free like restaurant takeaway streets if that makes sense yeah i'm fairly close to the center of town so it's i think a large amount of the trash

gets delivered to me yeah you end up with so much stuff it's stuff we used to get because we we live near here yeah and i remember the amount of crap we would get from the the local takeaways all the time um but monty goes on anyway that's a lot of words to say i got frontier because of the guys at walmart stay subtle humble and brave monty well thank you very much monty um you've been in touch before it's always good to hear from the repeats and hear what's going on in their life especially when it runs parallel to ourselves yes it seems all of us can look down on those who buys from advertisements but are we really that different or maybe we're all the same we're all just easily influenced i don't think i've bought stuff from what i don't agree with i think

i might have mentioned this in the common ground so i'm probably retracting old ground but the thing on amazon where it's like people that bought this have bought this yeah it's like yeah but i don't want the full package of stuff like you're talking about like buying one small piece of equipment and then you're talking about something that's like 500 pounds more you can't trick me into buying that recommend something cheaper maybe but don't try and like go all in i'm not i'm not fucking stupid like you bought something to like clean your shower would you also like to buy a water tank and a shower yeah it's like come on man the problem i know what you're doing you're trying to convince me the shower's the problem with a few words i'm not falling for that get

lost so that is the the mailbag the thing i wanted to mention that is tangential to the mailbag and uh this is something where we're still getting to the ins and outs of but as we talked about today halloween our 100th episode lines up with halloween so the friday the 30th of october will be episode 100 so what we're looking to do is some form of live action um it won't be in person but some sort of live stream ins and outs tbd but bookmark that wherever you are we're going to try and time it so it's late on on friday the 30th of october so that our weirdly global audience can all get involved in that yeah because it's hard to get time zones between chicago australia yeah chicago australia and then some parts of the uk but then also we've got a lot

of the um so you've got like iceland we've got a lot of like spread across europe so 30th of october will be 100 episodes for us we want to do something big for it and we don't want people to have to travel so if you're around on that evening keep an eye out we'll have more stuff come out in future we'll we'll let you know what the plan is but that just bookmark it that's coming we'll let you know more when we know we have no idea yet yeah as is our mantra that's the mailbag if you want to get in touch whether it's game related or common ground related anything related we will read it out it is info at warwithamate.co.uk uh we have an instagram which is just war with a mate our website is it has a web form on there you can check out the stuff we've put on there it's

warwithamate.co.uk we'd recommend using the email address not the web form for now because the email address is being well maintained the web forms are being sifted through but the system we have for it is lackluster copying and pasting them into an email and sending them to the email and we we've lost track of some of the web forms and the email so yeah and we want to read everything we want we don't want to miss anything because it's been lost in admin so if you feel like you've sent something long enough ago that it should have been read whatever your metric is for that fire it over by email there's no harm we will not read it twice if you've got a duplicate so it's all good and just to give a sense of where we are in the middle we're currently looking at

sort of march april-y yes if it's earlier than that we've missed it it's earlier than that it is lost fire another one over and we'll bump it up the queue yes we'll give you a priority list if you can prove you send it by web form but we have no way to prove it we'll be susceptible to Deception. Speaking of susceptible to deception, Andy, I believe we have some history to delve into. Yeah, let's talk about some British people. Yes, let's see.

Not us, some other British people. Almost a collective. Let's see how this goes. The men of the long-range desert patrols were quite a sight on their return to Cairo from a most trip to Libya. The contrast between the east and west of the Nile We are absolutely not qualified to share views on history.

So, Andy, where and when are we? Well, we covered the Italians and the Ottomans entering World War I. We've got one more entrant to cover at this time. The British Empire. Oh, those guys. Yes, those guys. So, start with a quote from Lord Gushen, the first Lord of the Admiralty,

which is a, again, just awesome title. Not quite. Okay. The Fruit Zone. Thought we'd break it up a little bit. I'm going to go for grapes or bananas. Big one. Grape.

Banana. Grapes are choking hazards. Okay. the fruit zone so lord kashan first lord of the admiralty uh in a speech in 19 uh 1896 we have stood here alone in what is called isolation our splendid isolation as one of our colonial friends was good enough to call it that colonial friend is a canadian politician called george foster he said in these somewhat troublesome days when the great mother empire stand splendidly isolated from europe so yeah in 1900 the british empire is the largest global

power in history it controls 20 of the earth's land with 400 million people living in it which is a quarter of the population of the world at the time it's insane yeah it's just insane as well being in the uk yeah and knowing that we were the the center point of an empire that expanded so far the largest empire in history we don't have buses or trains that run on time yeah i don't understand that it's such a weird disconnect we've been in it was described as managed decline um don't know how well they managed it but that's kind of how it feels now yeah it also has the greatest navy in the age of naval dominance but one of its holdings that is very important to us is egypt and we know egypt well yes but holding is definitely an oversimplification of the

arrangement at this time uh because egypt is technically an anonymous province of the ottoman empire however from 1882 it's been under de facto british rule something called the veiled protector veiled protectorate yes that's a that's a cool name it is yeah or i might steal that for dnd and switch it up a little oh you could it's also veiled called the veil protectorate because britain don't own it officially but as we'll get into they have an obscene amount of control over egypt so it's that's why it's veiled so they took indirect control for numerous region uh reasons uh one egypt's in deep financial trouble they go into huge debt to build the suez canal which yeah uh despite opening in 1896 it's so bad that egypt goes bankrupt in 1876

sorry it opened in 1869 and they went bankrupt in 1876 and this causes britain and france to step in and set up something called the jewel control system where they take over egypt's budget interesting with the goal primarily of ensuring that european investors get paid back great well i'm glad they're putting that money back into the economy locally yeah it's also vitally important to british geopolitics as the suez canal saves a ship 10 to 14 days to get to its eastern colonies such as india oh wow so you save two weeks not having to go around the horn of africa not the horn of africa sorry the bottom of africa yeah you know i didn't actually know what that translated to into the suez canal i imagine shipping time is a little bit different

now but it'll be i imagine the type of ships will be probably faster but yeah but it's still i don't know maybe those cargo ships are actually slower because they're so big i know stuff goes slow on sea you know you're still looking at what's like four miles an hour or something ridiculous yeah it's not i know it's constant but like it's yeah slow well remember how much trouble there was when that ship got sideways yes where it was like if they didn't sort that out pretty quickly it would have a similar effect of like closing the stream like there's a there's a couple of very narrow very important waterways yeah it's so wild that there's a a straight of water yeah if a ship gets stuck in there the world is like well we're done fuck we need to sort this out the economy's

crashed yeah the border's stuck so the foreign control of egyptian politics was also causing a massive amount of resentment and as was happening at the time there was a nationalist movement forming as egyptians go why are we being owned by either the ottomans or the british we're egyptian like it's the same problem the ottomans and the austrians are all having where like empire is hitting nationalism and nationalism wins out i guess yeah well it's it's smaller it's smaller scale it's more unified in a more personal identity than abstract empire yeah this leads to an uprising in egypt but the british are like we cannot let this go so they bombard alexandria alexandria in july 1882 and then there's a full-on full-on british

battle uh where the egyptian army uh gets crushed in september 1882 of that year the occupation is then meant to be a short-term intervention uh while everything gets all put back sort of more stable in theory uh but the british uh stayed there for decades under a veiled structure to sidestep the ottoman empire because like we haven't technically taken it over so they can't have a diplomatic incident yeah so britain would have direct or indirect control over egypt until the last british troops left in june 1956 so this is a good 70 year run that's a that's a wild period of time yeah so this is gonna i was just looking at the egyptian holdings there but this is moving on to the britain's overall diplomatic strategy at this time they're pursuing something

called the splendid isolation throughout the 19th century which i've mentioned in those initial quotes which might feel like a bit of an oxymoron because it's the british empire they're not isolated they're an expansionist colonial empire but what it actually means is they have a policy during this time period of avoiding permanent military alliances uh the belief is that they should be flexible so they can maintain the power uh balance of power in europe but mainly focus on expanding their colonial interests so they're just not making treaties with europe in the sort of back half of the 19th century that's a it's a bit of a a roadblock yeah it's also a bit of a well we'll see um so foreign secretary george canning whose principles would go on to design

his policy as summarizes it as follows non-intervention no european police system every nation for itself and god for us all the balance of power respect for facts not for abstract theorems respect for treaty rights but caution in extending them england not europe europe's domain and extends to the shores of the atlantic england's begins there so it's this idea of like we're a global power and we are separate from europe that's an interesting standpoint i mean yeah you can you really include us in a general broad stroke europe when there's a global empire at play the rules don't really apply the same surely yeah and we've always been isolated from europe i guess by geography and that yeah through time has led it to be

historic and cultural as well to a certain extent like well yeah because we've never in europe there are very few island nations that are just broken off no there's the like greek islands but they're not there's also a greek mainland yeah i don't know like yeah in terms of like sovereignty so yeah we I think we're the only place in Europe you can march an army to from another place in Europe Greenland and Iceland do they

oh Iceland I guess and Greenland yeah I don't know if they're I don't know the state of sovereignty for them I know it's recently been called into question but either way I guess as a European power Britain's always been isolated

yes yeah Greenland and Iceland never already had an empire that stretched 20 of the the land on the globe no which is also kind of because we were talking about last time with the it being 83 of the globe zoned by europe yes yes and then britain's got 20 yeah it's yeah that's an insane we were punching so far above our weight yeah how did we do this well colonialism i guess yeah and industrialism so anyway part of this isolation policy was the concept of the two power standard which passed as part of the naval defense act of 1889 which basically um britain it decided it would have to have a larger navy than the next two largest navies in the world combined yeah i see why they would

do that but yeah kind of a dick move uh which at the time was france and russia interesting because you don't see those two coming together no although they were allies during world war one they were part of the triple entendre i guess you don't see them coming together against britain no i think it's sort of because also they've got this isolation thing so it's like we need to be able to beat an alliance exactly and i'm thinking in what situation do france and russia come together that doesn't drag other nations into the conflict well to fight germany yeah oh i mean like against the uk oh yeah against against britain against the british empire you don't really have no because this this treaty does this this is a this isn't a treaty

this is a act of parliament that encourage i don't have the exact figures but they built a a crazy amount of ships in a short time i think they built like 70 ships in a decade or something so who is this against who is it that we're putting this restriction on oh it's a british manufacturing policy so it's we must make enough ships that we have oh sorry i thought it was like some sort of embargo on like another nation can't have like globally some sort of treaty they do i misunderstood that they do come in those kind of treaties you talked about do come into effect in like the 1920s after world war one yes i'm thinking like a versailles situation where it's like the british empire kind of put out a thing of like no other two nations

can have something that you know builds up a naval force unless collectively they make up less than ours no this is less we can enforce it on other people we're gonna we're gonna put out a lot of ships okay this makes more sense now uh which lasted until the early 1900s um due to a few things one is the rise of the industrialized nations like the the united states and germany who are both more technologically advanced than france and russia and have a stronger industrial base yep this means britain just cannot at this point afford to continue outproducing literally the entire world yeah i mean the us as well yeah the vastness of it it's with the us as well like from go it's it's borderline industrial yeah the railroad comes in super quick yeah relative to

its nation and also america is just like the perfect place to be setting that up you've got like the mississippi delta which can feed everyone you've got like everything you need to be because it's so big as well yeah so so vast it's got all the bits and pieces you need i see why they did what they did yeah so yeah britain can't afford to outproduce the entire world here uh and then the british navy really shoots itself in the foot because in 1906 it launches the hms dreadnought this is a turbine powered ship with massive gun batteries which means it's faster and has a longer range than any other type of ship or any other ship on the sea when it launches but this also renders all previous ships essentially obsolete like some people refer to the old ships at this

point as five minute ships because they would last five minutes against the dreadnought wow So what they've done is they've essentially rendered the last 15 years of intense shipbuilding pointless and reset everything so they have one Dreadnought and everyone else has zero, which is a much smaller gap to close. Oh, right. Okay, so now everyone is looking at,

I want to build my Dreadnought. Yeah, and all the old ships you had, like your legacy stuff, is not useful. Your naval strength is kind of null and void. You've reset the board entirely because now it's about Dreadnought. Yes. right okay that's this makes a lot of sense about naval restructuring and how that power

shift comes into play yes they've went too far with their own upgrade yes and the germans are able to build dreadnoughts at a comparable rate to britain right okay this is painting a bit of a clearer picture and this is part of what contributes to the end of britain's isolation and it has to start finding allies because it's got equals. Yeah, other people can build Dreadnaughts, so we need to team up with the other Dreadnaughts to have a comparable force.

Yeah, because our entire fleet is now... Imagine being in that meeting where you've created the Dreadnaught, you've designed it, you've created it, and then it's like, ah. But what if they do that? Yeah. So surely there must have been some sort of discussion

at some point where they're like do we do this yeah like how because that seems like on paper when i'm hearing it now that sounds really short-sighted to make a ship because what was the stoppage from someone else making that ship they could have i guess that's the thing i think it wouldn't be called a dreadnought because if i'm remembering rightly each class of ship is named after the first ship of that type to leave yeah so like the destroyer the first destroyer was destroyer like dreadnought made the name of the class of ships dreadnought but there would have been whatever the german version like this was coming it was like combining steam power huge gun batteries but all the same size and they got rid of the small and medium guns on it because

it's like if anyone gets close enough things have got completely fucked here like we should be killing people on the horizon not yeah there's no way it should get to a close close yeah and yeah these ships are also because they're steam turbine powered they're faster and they have more range yeah which that is a combo that just cannot be beat yeah faster and longer range you can't you can't lose yeah so this wasn't the only thing that knocked britain out of its isolation note although it's a very important factor the other um and is a lot of illusions britain has about itself are actually shattered by the first boa war in 1899 oh yes so this highlights several issues for britain first off britain has no friends i mean we've kind of been douchebags

historically at this point so but this really brings it into like this is the almost the the sober moment or the moment of clarity where it's like oh i've i've alienated everyone you you wake up after a night out you're hungover you've got you've got bfa the anxiety is kicking in and you're going to message someone and realize you're blocked yeah and then you're going to message the next friend you're blocked everyone hates you yeah because it's currently engaged in disputes of the united states france germany and russia all of whom's government and population are overwhelmingly pro-boer and anti-british in sentiment oh brilliant which they're right to be because of the way they handle it but this exposes the fact that if a major

european power had decided to attack britain at that moment while its army was in south africa they'd have no allies in europe to protect them that's a grim realization yeah when your navy's just become defunct yeah oh the dreadnought launches in 1906 this is 1899 okay sorry sorry we've got some time yeah there's just various factors that end this isolation so yeah the war also exposes the weakness of britain's armies um the boas used modern rifles paired very effectively with guerrilla tactics for devastating effect and the british in response respond with extreme measures such as pioneering concentration camps for civilians which again greatly stains its international reputation yeah rightly so because as soon as you implement that

you're a bad guy yes i think there's not really a historical example where you do that and you're not the bad guy yeah no there isn't yeah you just can't i think it's i think it's objectively evil so so this is the boa wall highlights how alone they are internationally almost and like how they're very not liked it also reveals a massive internal societal problem which is when the war starts uh between 40 and 60 percent of uh working age men who volunteer are rejected due to being physically unfit to serve oh man and this leads to a realization that having massive industrial slums with poor sanitation filled with sickly and poor

people who were poorly educated meant that they had a generation that was too weak to fight a war against another vital and robust power. For instance, Germany. You know what, I bet that would be the same now, because I'm not

fitting well. I know most of the people in my circles I don't think could fight a war. yeah um and we'll get into it next time how this affects them both domestically and uh diplomatically but part of this is a lot of they start passing like education they create sewers they try to deal with the poverty and it's just the thing of like it's never from like looking out for poor people it's purely we need these fuckers to fight and they're too sick that's such a bad position to

be in yeah where you look at your your draw of fighters and realize that your country's so ill yeah with smog rickets people just not getting treated it's also 40 to 60 percent is the national average i can't remember which town it was but it's like a industrial town it might be liverpool uh but they had they had something like eight to ten thousand rejected out of twelve thousand volunteers because it's particularly bad like yeah so this is also including the rich people and the people who pass so the rates of like the poor are fucking insane which i know the divide now is you know pretty crazy in terms of wealth gaps but health gaps yeah just just to be fit to fight yeah and i don't know what the testing was back then to determine it but i

imagine it's a bit more primitive than it is now well the words of frank reynolds science back then was real crude well people then were malnourished people now are poor people then were malnourished poor people now are typically overweight because they're yeah it's all like that's how good but either way you can't fight yeah regardless you're not going to be good in a war yeah also just side note smog and rickets that they sound like old-timey issues they are like there's just something about it like the i don't know the way the word hits yeah like smog is definitely a thing now but like smog and rickets if i hear smog i think of like a foggy dirty like victorian london yes and rickets just sounds like a such an old-timey illness and ailment yeah

like nowadays you know like covet 19 that sounds kind of sci-fi yeah rickets you know that was back in the day rickets was an old-timey illness yeah but yeah that's britain had its splendid isolation which was not so splendid um no and this will lead to a churning of deal making which will pull them all on splendid isolation you mean having no friends yeah that's not splendid isolate that's bad there's no splendor in this whatsoever it's bad shit i can't remember who had the quote but it was like the it was either a prime minister or like the foreign secretary or something like that had a quote where it was like britain just needs to lazily float down the river of history and

occasionally pull out a billhook to push itself off an obstacle i was like that's not you've not reached the point where it's all downhill how long is that gonna last buddy as we found out not forever no well another swell history segment andy i'm interested to see how we end up historically tied to the first world war but so far it's looking like because we're pariahs on a global scale and because our boats are fucked by our own making. Yeah. Brilliant. Ties it all in

nicely. Yeah. The only other thing to tie in nicely now, what a beautiful segue, is our journey. Because ours is one also fraught with obstacles, but the one thing that we can't do is leave this without any friends. No. We need to remain friends

We cannot have a splendid isolation. There cannot be any splendid isolation in this. Common ground, the enemy of splendid isolation. If they had common ground, they would never have ended up in that situation. We wouldn't have either of the world. We wouldn't have had any wars. Everyone would just be kind of, you know, beefing a little bit. And then at the end of the day, they'd go, hang on a moment.

What if cats were municipal property? And then they'd go, ha ha, that was funny. Anyway, we're pals. But they didn't. We instead take on that burden. And so let's move on to some common ground. And now for something nicer. A little oasis in the war. It's time for some Common Ground. I'm trying the intro for Common Ground. I'm recording. Maybe. Yeah.

Well, our Common Ground has to be a chance for us to discuss a topic, come together on it, and remain friends during our conflict. And with only one turn to go, it's important and i've got something for us to discuss whether or not it'll unite us completely i'm not sure but my common ground this week is we need to figure out what old people can do okay so people are living longer nowadays yeah significantly more so than they used to you'll hit retirement age and people can live another 30 years after that i'm not even 30 yeah i haven't hit 30 yet so they've got another one of my lifetime on top and during that for the most part they will be people capable of thought i know yes you know you've got diseases that will

debilitate as you go on because the average is like mid to high 70s for men and like low 80s for women in britain isn't it yeah so you've still got like you know a decade on average after retirement yeah for some people so with that nowadays you've got so many different things that are diminishing human output automation ai a big one in the vague terms that it's described as you've got all these different forms of of output so old people yeah and i'm not saying put old people to work because i think there's something quite nasty about that they shouldn't have to work longer i don't think elderly people should have to work beyond the point where it's fair for them to maybe you know call it a day but there's got to

be something that they can put out there and yeah you've got like you've got your david attenborough's you've got your your national treasures where they're pumping stuff out where it's like really big and really impactful yeah but also he's got a job i would do till i was 100 yes that's it he's got one of the coolest jobs ever it makes sense he's doing it to 100 it doesn't like if you're a cashier or a retail worker

you might enjoy it but you're not wanting to do it forever well if I was a retail worker from like age like 16 or 18 and I just did that constantly I think I would be dead by like 50 like the just the

like the toll on your mind and there's there's certain aspects of the erosion of your faith in humanity yeah there's certain aspects of that kind of because what i will do i will call the question here noel edmonds um noel edmonds at one point was on some some talk show or something and talked about how negativity uh impacts health and that people with you mentioned specifically people with cancer i think and i might be paraphrasing some of this but this this did stick in my mind is this like a placebo effect thing yeah it must be rooted somewhere that he said something negative about you know people with cancer that they think negatively they'll die they need to think more

positively and it's like right okay i get positive thinking placebo effect has been to some degree proven that it has some some impact yeah it's a thing and i think there is a thing of like a good attitude does a good attitude does help absolutely i found that in my life you know there's been situations where a more positive outlook i feel things go better i feel like my my look is better i feel like things just work more smoothly so there is some some you know actual credence to that yeah but by the same merit that's not everything all people will have ailments and afflictions but yeah if you put them to work for their whole life it will diminish them there's got to be something else though do you have any ideas well that's what i need to figure out andy

we need to figure out what they can do I've got one I think okay childcare is really really expensive yes I reckon

if you could do a thing where like if a grandparent is looking after their child they get like a carer thing yeah like a carer's allowance because you do have that for people who i guess yeah because you do i guess there's two sides to this i'll put up both sides you've got um the fact that carer's allowances and stuff

like that child benefit they exist already but the thing is child benefits already paid to a parent and carer's allowances are a bit different so you kind of i guess if you take carer's allowance and you're not paying someone who might have that anyway carer's allowance tends to apply to people who are caring for people who are vulnerable or have disabilities i care as well this might be the wrong thing but like a thing where it's like oh if the grandparents take their grandkids to like look after during the day say for three days a week yeah they get like a bump on their pension or something yeah because the parents also then can spend less on nursery i think it's a thing of like old they do a lot of useful productive stuff they can do yeah and it's just if you can maybe

incentivize because i guess in the uk we've got um like child care like for child care you get like a certain amount of um like child care uh like days covered hours covered yeah like nurseries and stuff um so you you do you do get that covered so i guess you could diminish that slightly and have it paid at a smaller rate to grandparents i just don't know what that impact has on like nurseries and stuff like if that starts to buckle that economy a little bit maybe also when it comes to child care and you know this is this is speaking as a parent when it comes to child care i know what it's like to look after a young kid so when it comes to an elderly person having to do that there are you know times for me where it's

like this is you know you have your moments and it's it's not it's not the end of the world as someone who is in their 20s but when it's someone who is 70 plus and they're having to deal with a kid who can run around anywhere yeah that is how well of a caregiver can a 75 80 year old be i guess there'd be yeah you know you get into a thing of like essentially testing as well yeah how do you test that and at that point there's so many illnesses that old people can you know latch on to and i guess kids are just like little petri dishes okay so That's a good point as well. The kids will kill off the elderly.

You will have an arms race of disease that the children don't know they're fighting where you take a kid from a nursery, you put them into an old person's home. That old person is dead in six months. If they're seeing them every single day, that old person will perish well before their time. Maybe not childcare?

Childcare feels dangerous. Okay, that's fair. Maybe... Because I do also... There's something... This is also, like, helpful for elderly people because people really... It's sort of the positive attitude thing,

but I think people really fade when they don't feel useful or, like, they're contributing. Yeah. And then it can't... Well, you see it with people a lot who are elderly. My great-granddad, he lived to be about 90, and he was actually in the North African campaign. Shout out.

um he lived to be about 90 but his health massively deteriorated when his wife died yeah when my great-grandma died he started to like drop off massively i think dementia was a big part of it but like it seemed like such a sharp decline you see that a lot it's like the loss of a long-term partner uh just after retirement is also a big one yeah so i think the being productive in society i think for the people themselves for the elderly that's got to be beneficial keeping active whether it's the mind or the body i think the mind is probably the more likely thing you can keep active yeah but without it being work it feels like it's a weird balance you don't want to exploit you don't want to exploit you don't want to enforce and you

don't want to basically make a soft raise on the retirement cap where it's like you retire and then you do 10 years of your like old people civil service yeah i guess it's more like what kind of artistic or creative output can you encourage for the older generation here's one for you give the infrastructure for it

I think this would also require a scheme but I also think you could hire some young people to help with this if an old person wants to put their like a memoir out yes

or something like that you like create a facility to help them and even if it's not like a oh they've done anything crazy it like helps build up a like a rich textured sort of like not moment of life one i think snap you know the slice of life slice of life yeah it lets you like build that up and it also like lets them talk about their life which is probably helpful yeah that's a good point because and it would be cool to have all that stuff because that's it i think about the the game i think about the history segments yeah and it's stuff that i had no interest in until we started this i i really had no interest whatsoever in the north african campaign really in world war ii in history at all and then we started getting into this and i'm like

wow if i could have spoke to my great granddad before he passed and asked him questions about this i'm not sure how much he would have shared yeah you don't want to push them but give them the option i think yeah but you know he would have had some some things to say you know however big or small it would have been there would have been some fucking crazy information i'm sure he would have been able to share at his will and what kind of information is there out there from these anecdotal experiences and how much is lost and will never come back because nowadays there's so much that's recorded everything is documented the amount of people that record something put it online you can piece together the world kind of like batman's machine in the dark night yeah where

you can like it's like echolocation from everyone's device in the city and you can build up a sonic like a sonic picture yeah it's kind of like that with stories nowadays you can do that with all of the recorded information but all of the stuff predating that there is still a window of time that's closing where there's information that came about before that that will be lost forever we don't have that yet there is that window still if we can capture that before we catch up to the massive digital era we can probably still salvage that so maybe that's it yeah you could have like yeah some sort of memoir infrastructure some memoir system maybe you uh you you encourage it or incentivize it.

Maybe there's a fee paid for each memoir. Maybe you hire staff to do it. The financial viability is the question. I mean, even if there's not, like, a fee, you're paying them. I think it could be something where it's like, oh, this is, like, a public good. Yeah, you're getting to put into it. Also, it's like, rather than everyone in a history class

do an essay that's basically the same and at this point they'll probably chat GPT it it's like oh your assignment for this term is our family member or something like that

which to be fair I think is I do actually think I have that at some point but like you could extend that if you were worried about but I think it's like that's the kind of because I know someone And elderly family members I have get very frustrated because they're a bit slower, but in their head they're not.

Yeah, well, I think that is it. Yeah, but if you've got someone who's just patiently listening to them, they might not have any stories that change history or anything, but they might give you a really good insight into what it was like to live in this region in this time period collected at this socio-economic level and then if that's collected maybe historians down the line yeah because you always get the whole you know back in my day and i mean they love talking about yeah well that's the amount of people who are elderly and it's like you hear the same story

15 times from them and it's every time you see them they tell the same story about the same cruise that they went on that was mine with my grandparents it was it was you know they wanted this cruise to egypt and it was the same crew story idea pretty much every week you'd go around for sunday dinner yeah and them getting the chance to speak to that that whatever the context of that story is to a stranger and who's interested yeah it's it's first time around for them for the stranger it's not a family member who's been like in doctrine to this through generations at this point where it's like oh this again instead it's a fresh pair of eyes fresh pair of ears they're interested they're engaged they can transform that into an interesting

narrative and if it's voluntary you know some old people they just want to get on with yeah getting old they want to relax they've got family maybe they will take care of grandchildren maybe they will just play golf who knows but the people who want to share that story if they can get to i don't think there's anything cooler than a really good story told from someone yeah big believer in first i mean we play a lot of dnd i love that aspect of sitting around a narrative is woven and i think if an elderly person can spin that and yeah they might do the bit of repeating the same small details the whole oh yes and then we went here with was it was it was it derrick's girlfriend or or no no no no i think they're engaged at that point by then so

he wasn't yeah and yeah you'll get stuck on those points but if you've got some sort of professional involved in this they can disseminate that information also go through photo albums yes they could even go through document it could even be a service where it's like oh we're going to go through your photo albums we're going to organize all of them but we're also going to go for all your documents because your finances tell us something about history but also it's like a check to make sure nothing's being yeah you know what there's actually safeguarding aspects to this yeah where you can stop like financial abuse as well maybe yeah there's a few different benefits to this it would be kind of cool if like when a grandparent or someone died you got the like will

but you also got their book yes like their their story yeah and they could like work up to it however long and then someone will like produce that everyone gets a biography in the family gets the biography of their yeah gets the biography of their grandparents or their parents or whoever they want i think that's yeah that's awesome i think that's uh maybe that is the common ground maybe that's what old people can do it's just unfortunately we can't we can't give it we don't have the infrastructure we don't have the means that feels like it could be a charity if someone enterprising is out there i thought it's probably put some good in the world yeah the storytellers charity yeah you know what what a wholesome fucking common ground that turned out to be

that was a really nice one i didn't know where we were going with that when i put it out there i thought you know old people what are they gonna do that ended up really nice yeah hey look at that we're putting the world to rights andy i think when it comes to setting ourselves up for this last wave of conflict in this practice scenario what a lovely jumping off point we've got a great way to end in five we were just lovely guys just two subtle humble and brave guys and i think uh when it comes to what we've got coming next there will be ups and downs but we're we're doing exactly what we've just encouraged we're telling our story and for those following along thank you up to now for those following in future hello and from me james me andy stay subtle humble and brave

in those deserts of your minds as we rapidly approach the end of this practice scenario and a very very long 111 turns up ahead and we'll see you for the whole journey goodnight We'll see you next time. get you experience the most comfortable mattress in the world the sleep number smart bed at the

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