War With A Mate - Episode 84: Andrew’s Choice

Episode Date: July 10, 2026

The Second Op Stage of Turn Six has unleashed Andy’s fury, laying waste to more of James’ forces and leaving the future of Bardia, Tobruk, and vast stretches of desert up in the air - with only one decision to decide where the final stretch plays out. Andy’s History Corner sees out the end of the Ottoman Empire, and Common Ground really moves the goalposts. Email: [e-mail] Website: WarWithAMate.co.uk Instagram: WarWithAMate

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Because we have your number. Hello, welcome to a panic attack with me, James. Me, Andy. Wow, it's tense. That cortisol is really fluent, Andy. it's a second last off stage of the practice scenario and it's not been holding back it has not and we've nearly wrapped up the second off stage yes we've got a lot done today nearly swallowed it up in one go again so uh yeah this isn't just a panic attack it's also a podcast

called war with a mate and we are playing the campaign for north africa we're doing a six turn practice run and we are on the precipice of finishing after a very long 18 months it's it's not slowing down speeding up it's become much more of a frightful endeavor towards the end than i expected yes there's something about knowing that those kinder buenos that we put on the line for the winner are so close delicious hazelnut cream for me they really really hang in the balance sorry it sounds like there's some sort of dispute going on next door hope that doesn't get picked up on the mic that's uh that's allowed someone's having a bad day i'm having a pretty good day overall yeah the play session was yeah fraught with intensity

but all in all enjoyable it again it's kept up the streak it has for a few weeks now of feeling like a game ever since i had that that wobble uh it's it's really come back around into feeling like playing a yeah complicated and kind of all over the place game but it's really boiled down to decisions i think also because we've just slammed all our trucks basically into units it makes my life so much less to manage it's so much nicer knowing that they'll really actually they'll never really be another truck day for the rest of the scenario no i mean i think i've got two convoys that'll move but i've got one that kind of supplies my air bases yeah and i've got i've got one in bardia as well yeah so those guys can can supply where they need to they're also

kind of my lifeline to make sure i can continue to play the game because that way i can't lose yeah the the scenario but i suppose maybe we should recap what exactly went on today yeah let's say what we did we started off with the start of every upstage air stuff i guess technically there's the water stuff there's organization phase but that's not much no construction's getting finished we're not building anything no what would be the point and start we could build a supply dump yeah but we've got no trucks to put shit in there yeah it's a bit of a hollow and we've got yeah uh i get water distribution that is done my guys aren't thirsty apart from my garrisons there i mean they're dead okay my garrisons that need water they died a while ago

they're still on the board but i was thinking about it today they would have lost like 16 toe points at this point most of them are like four toe points so they died back in turn two is that all your down south guys yeah uh jarabub uh garabub yeah um yeah they're dead they died a while ago some of the guys to the west on map b the power regiment um they died at some stage i just left them there and i've also got a bunch of guns that i placed in the middle of nowhere because i looked at the game in a very broad sense where there'd be a lot of swinging pendulum action maybe for the full game that would be the case but i've got them kind of planted in the middle of nowhere in map b yeah not realizing that you don't really go through the middle of nowhere

so i've had guns sat there for the whole scenario with no water the other ones my truck brand it's briefly encountered um no some of those i i had some guys go over and bring along with them and then the truck bandits had a fight with them yeah because i thought well those are just guns nearby i'll i'll bring them into the fold but there are some others with similar stats that are just kind of scattered around the border of map b right next time we get the map i'll show you they're just kind of there. Is it border of map B and C? Yes, B and C.

I don't actually think there's any units on map A. I don't think I've got any guys, like infantry on map A. I think some of them were optional that I could place around map A, but I could be wrong. I think I had the option to place them anywhere in Libya. So I could have placed them there,

but I decided not to. That will be very different in the full game. You're going to defend. yeah i cannot be leaving that wide open especially knowing that you can push you've proven that you can push but uh yeah when it comes to air stuff that's that's when we really sank our teeth in today and it was fairly straightforward for me because i didn't have much to go with i just had my few refitted planes after my big blowout last time so i just had bombers again madalena gone so no fighters all bombers i had a single bombing mission yes against the sixth australian

i thought based on their position because they are in the escarpment area they're along that north coast yep so i thought i'll pin them down so that they can't zip along too far because they had not huge corridors to move through but they could swing around what's left of my wall that's boxing in the seventh yes if they're going south yeah i thought they could swing down real far south and try something crazy so i thought pin them so that was my move and i did pin three of them three of the the groups so that was pretty effective you went for a bit of a bigger air mission a bit more ambitious yeah i did two flights over of fighters over the fourth and the seventh oh is that who it was over you mentioned you had two air patrols um they are solid bets

seventh would be a a safe bet but my thought process was i've got them boxed in do i really need to pin them as events would transpire i could have done with that yeah and the fourth yeah i mean just a solid call but i thought with 204 bombs that's all i had i can reliably pin one division yeah or i can kind of scatter it about maybe pin one or two from each but i thought in the end if i pin them like that they are going to link up again by upstage three yes so it means that they're there for the final push my thinking with the uh seventh and fourth of them are two lynchpin divisions like they'd just be the ones i'd be like the most damn i want them to be able to do things and i did wear that up i did think do i go for your big guys and really

slow them down but i've decided to take a bit of a scattershot approach and try and keep them pinned down with my land units and then with the sixth being a bit more mobile see if i can pin them down with air stuff yeah kind of cover you on all fronts use everything i've got in my arsenal to hinder you everywhere i can yes in hindsight after how today went i think i would have preferred to double down on say the seventh or the fourth yeah maybe even the sixth maybe find a way to maneuver my land units double down but we live and learn yeah some of my guys don't have that grace no some of them learned but they they didn't live as i described learning in pow camps that's true that's true as i described it earlier uh some of them are steadfast and some of them

have died fast yes but your bombing runs you had some of those three yes i did your garrison that caused me problems last time yes the old to brute garrison they are still sat at the western part of the escarpment around hellfire i got two of your guns but from what you said they're two of the least effective guns so it's not like i really did much you pick the last two on a sheet of about 13 guns and those two are exclusively for anti-tank and anti-air yeah don't have defense ratings i i don't think they have barrage ratings off the top of my head based on my reaction to them being pinned i don't think they did yeah but they definitely don't have defense ratings so they wouldn't have been the best to hold off against you so i wasn't too hurt about them getting pinned

i'll take that i'm a i'm a big guy i can take you pinning my guns that don't do anything that's very magnanimous of you i am really quite headstrong and heartstrong so for me Bladder week. Bladder week, as Hulk would say. Bladder week. You know what? That is accurate, though. I go to the toilet a lot.

Like, liquid. My body can't hold liquid. Yeah. I have, like, a sip of anything, and my body's just like, let it go. Like Elsa. Just void your bowels. That could freeze in you for a bit.

Void your bowels, void your bladder. I can hold my bowels longer. You'd hope. but like i can like i can go like three days at a time sometimes yeah that's really bad yeah i don't know maybe that has an effect on the bladder do you think certainly there's a bunch of shit pushing stuff around on your lower torso yeah maybe no yes hey i guess people were right andy when they said i'm full of shit yeah yeah the doctor me my bowelologist your bowel Colologist.

I don't know what the actual name is. Colonologist? Colonologist? What is renal? Is renal... It's something that happens before kidney failure. Right, okay. As in the only context I've ever heard that word in is renal kidney failure.

Okay. But I don't know what that means. I'll not get too worried then. I'm not going to WebMD myself with your words. That's good. That doesn't seem fine. Oh, what's this? I think this is a McDonald's receipt in my upper shirt pocket.

We don't need to talk about that, or... Yeah, so it is. I could have stayed there. Yeah, I've just realised I ironed the shirt that I'm wearing this morning. Is that why the receipt's so full? It is. It's also why it's started to melt the ink off, and thankfully not into this lovely shirt.

I wore the shirt to our live show, Andy. It's the same shirt. Same jeans as well. I'm wearing the live show outfit. Oh, nice. Look at that. You're not. I'm wearing the same jeans.

You've got... Is that a wet patch on you, or is it sweat? I guess it's still wet, regardless. If it's salty, sweat. Welcome to the salty spittoon. How tough are you? Not very. You wouldn't do very well in the Spongebob universe.

I'd do great in the Spongebob universe. Maybe that'll be a common ground one day. I'd live in a giant wheel of cheese. That's not even slightly thematic. He lives in a pineapple. Yeah, he lives in a pineapple under the sea. We've heard the theme song. I live in a cheese wheel under the sea.

stop trying to pitch spinoffs Hillenburg's dead Andy I live in a cheese whale under the sea I am surrounded by dairy that would be my theme song by dairy? I don't know man maybe pitch it when I'm in a different state of mind

I'm in war mode right now you're not going to be able to appeal to me very easy with that kind of shit oh that's a shame because I'm just a little bit delirious is it the heat again? because it's another warm day oh I'm sorry man you know you've coped a lot better today i have yeah congrats kudos well i mean if i coped any

worse i'd be dead that's a good point you'd have renal heart failure oh no i don't know how that works but uh any doctors let us know sounds bad oh fuck yeah so yeah after i bombed the garrison uh second libyan got a smattering they did second libyan are down there with the 63rd serene yeah they're in a little patch of rough just below the escarpment cliffs yeah it's that little gap in the escarpment uh on the the yeah if you head down south along that escarpment you can come through that little gap it's only one hex of a gap i believe we are one hex and that's where they've been holding so that if your guys the is that the fourth fourth yeah yeah they're on the coast yeah the fourth could have dipped further down and and made their way through there so

they've been holding that spot and you you bombed both of them you bombed the 63rd and the the the libyans second libyan yeah my worry was you'd use them to move in and pin the fourth against the coast and i can't essentially lose them for the rest of the game which was actually something i was debating today cool yeah i thought you might be wearing that like moving down with some escarpment guys and those two move up and fall for just our commission. Yeah, yeah, they had a bit of maneuverability in the things they could have done

because I also could have moved them west and pinned the guys against my gun. Yes. Yeah, so I had a few places I could have put them, but you bombed them, you pinned not many. I think it was two of each.

You pinned just one infantry from the 63rd because they didn't have many guys left. You pinned one infantry. It was the second infantry of that group because it had two infantry and one gun. You pinned the second infantry. Are you not thinking of something that happened later?

No, no, I think it was those guys. Because it was 108-odd bombs, so the minimum pin was two. Yeah, but you rolled 60-something. Oh, no, yeah, that would have been two. Are you thinking of the... We had a fight later in my turn where i pinned an infantry in it yeah i am i am uh and ahead of yourself spoilers just to tell

spoilers we continue to fight a war in africa uh yeah that you're right they did get someone else pinned they pinned two infantry and then it was the same for the 63rd 63rd and second libyan both had two guys pinned i think a lower old well not really lower old it was just the brackets were like 1 to 40 odd. Yeah, it was broad, yeah. Yeah, that's right, yeah. I get you now, I get you. So, yes, you pin some of those guys

which left them in a state where they couldn't do a whole lot of manoeuvring without leaving some guys behind. Which wrapped up the air stuff. It did, it was a quick one. It was, the air stuff went a lot quicker than the land stuff. Air stuff is so fast if you don't get a dogfight. Yeah, without the dogfight it is

just how many bombs do I have? it's so weird it can even be 10 minutes or if it pans out like four hours yeah it's either the full session or part of done straight away and that was it that was the end of the air which moved us straight onto land and i with initiative have given myself the first go so i shuffled some guys around nothing crazy though i didn't get into any fights of my own volition yeah i decided to jig around rejig rather not jig jig is the initial move rejig this this is all in the rules by the way rejig is taking things and redoing them i took all of the trucks from the third ccnn the black shirts who are into brook who are into brook and they are partying there with the first ccnn

first black shirts they've been around for the whole thing they are a mainstay so they were sat up there together and i thought the third are going to stay put where they are there's plenty of supplies into brook i don't need them to have trucks anymore yeah so i robbed them of those trucks for both the movement trucks and their supply trucks and i generously gave them to the first black shirts yeah and the first black shirts used said trucks to zip along that northern road and then dart down past bardia and sit themselves nicely on the border of the escarpment right next to the Tobruk garrison all the guns. Yes, so you

rebuilt that wall on the escarpment closest to Bardia. Build it, I think, better than I did before because now it's a gun and I also then moved up the fourth black shirt to help bolster that so now I have the gun garrison,

the Tobruk one, they are sat at the only gap of the western part of the escarpment and then on either side of them I've got a black shirt division and those black shirt divisions are mostly untouched the first and fourth have actually stood the test of time for some reason i had in my head that the fourth were absolutely disheveled but it was mostly cohesion drops and supplies right so they've had a few turns to rest they're sort of back to their cohesion is completely fine now they've been sat there for a while

the first have been sat in to brook for a while they're they're fully supplied they've just got a ton of trucks so they've just been darting around uh with loads of stuff so now that wall is perfect because it means regardless of which hex you move into to try and go to the escarpment edge you will be fighting one of the black shirt divisions and also the gun yeah in fact in one position you'll have to fight all three yes which is if i take the middle one yeah which would be very funny for me it would not work out well yeah i mean you've got the option so it would be crazy for you to choose that so that was my movement that's all i did i believe yeah that yeah that is it jig them around rejigged rejigged and then you started to move yes that took up the

rest of our session and your movement's not over not even close and i i can see why so andy take it away so this is this was an interesting one for me there's one way to put it so phase one i guess because you loop um was just making sure everyone who might need to do stuff was within two hexes of an enemy so that they can move again at the end if they need to yeah and then after that um i did i moved the 16th infantry brigade who were in city pirani uh i moved them along so they were within two of your 63rd and second libyans yeah they were just hanging on the the edge there yeah i was kind of worried they were going to go for them but they are tactically placed because while they are one away from the escarpment end so that they aren't in contact

with the guys up the hill yeah they are still in rough which is a two defense it is it means if you go into combat with them you move the column two to the left yes so it's a pretty hefty disadvantage when you're fighting them but the escarpment's what three the escarpment's three yeah so like the fact yeah it's very good so it's a real nice position for them to be in where they can hold that defensive line against the the hill to the south yeah and if anyone comes from any other side they're going to be fighting with a hefty disadvantage yeah so moved them up um that was just so they were within two so they could be used again uh the sixth australian who you bombed split them so the guys who got pinned by bombs got split off uh because it worked out really nicely

um the free infantry you pinned in the sixth australian were beneath the same hq yes so just could very easily uh switch that so they went down to city barani now that it's vacant yeah because they couldn't do anything else and then the sixth and the second new zealand got to work they absolutely did they decided they were going to try and break this little defensive ring that i've got around the seventh their job i guess i can tell you now because also uh well we'll get to it their job solely was to free the seventh which i could i could gauge because the way you went in through your movement you went ham on these guys yes hell for leather and you credit to you you committed to the bit yeah it was it was a lot so yeah you you really went in

on the, initially, the 63rd. 63rd or at the bottom of the hill. 62nd. Yeah. Who held up for a couple of fights. They have been my golden boys for the last turn. Turn 5 they were, well, I guess end of turn

5, start of turn 6. They have just been chewing through what they can. Yeah. They came along fully motorized. And really held the line. I think they're fully motorized. Might be thinking of someone else. They are, no sorry i don't think they are um they are i'll double check that i would i guess from an

outside perspective i'd guess they're not because you never really you put them in place and then i didn't zip them along very far like if you have motorized them that was probably a mistake i'd say i've motorized one of those guys i get very lost because i've stopped moving them around so much yeah i've planted them again but you you went in hard for them went in with the sixth and the second new zealand for the first attack got a retreat which i took yes then the second loss 20 losses on those guys then the second followed them the sixth stayed where they were uh six moves slightly to stay within two yeah that's very important for everything that's going on here and then the second just went in i think they had three fights after that

yeah no um they they only had one more with them yes sorry yes they had one more fight with the 62nd which pushed them again one pushed them two hexes yes it was a real heavy hit i think the losses weren't particularly

crazy again i think it might mean 15 yeah 15 oh it was even because weirdly the way the hexes the retreat work is the higher the number because uh have we talked about this um your roll and that number is your percentage losses yes you roll the two six-sided dice you then also that and that'll give you like 50 they go up in

fives yeah it gives you a percentage loss which is determined but then there's other things that dice roll works for and you add them together yeah so the say you're all of a 34 it's a seven yeah for some purposes and one of them is the retreat table which is sort of which is at the bottom of it you're looking at like four to six is like a one hex retreat seven to eight is a two hex retreat for example but they are arranged a bit weirdly where it might be like one to four and then six to eight there's gaps and then there's just a gap um but typically the higher you get the more retreat but the lower

you get on the casualties so if you get an 11 that's maximum casualties but it's not going to be maximum retreat yes you tend to do more damage I think I got like a 64 so I did like 5% maybe but got the 2 hex

because it was no it was a 65 because it was 11 yes oh that's it you did 0 yes that's it you did zero percent losses on that last hit on them and i decided i can either hold them in place and they take 20 because for every hex you refuse to retreat you lose 10 yeah or i can just accept that they haven't actually lost anyone here and they have to move further back which i did so they moved two hexes back it means they do still have a zone of control that prohibits

movement past them to bardia yes and they haven't lost anyone because is it i need to think double check it is it they have to have one actual one actual point worth of defense or attack to have a zone of control i believe so i will double check that as well that's important for some of my guys because some of them are bare bones yeah but yeah they they ended up having to move back two hexes that's that's okay i'd rather they move back to and don't lose any guys and still have a zone of control just a bit further west yeah that was fine so you decided after that it was time to go for the next part of this slightly south again with the second new zealand yeah they were your uh and you went for the maletti division yes the maletti division have been a real rock in the

road i think every turn i've taken significant percentages off them they've just been sat there I did actually look through their sheet, and it is most turns you've had a fight with them. Yeah. And most turns, they take damage, but not crazy amounts. No, they seem to have held up really well. They've either been in fights that have been kind of balanced by the looks of it on the sheet, or you've just rolled badly, and they've ended up taking minimal losses and just kind of held their own. Yeah.

So they just keep on coming back. They're a bad penny. They keep on turning up. and you fought them, I think it was three, was it four? Three or four? Three. Yeah, three. Three fights.

And the first two were just dismal in the damage that you did. Rolled very badly, yeah. But because of the dismal damage roll, I did get a little bit of damage from you refusing a retreat. Yes. So there was

a 15 and then a 15 again this is where the were these the guys with two gun uh two infantry and one gun yes that's when this pin happened that's right yeah you pinned uh pinned one of their infantry and they they stood strong you chipped them away you took out two of the uh battalions in the end you took out what was left of two battalions and the gun and the gun is gone so there's one battalion left it's just the headquarter and then you took out the last one so yeah in that order so that was three and then you left them at the end of the third combat because they no longer exert a zone of control yeah they're just a shell just an hq unit and

with just an hq they are still on the map they're still a hex but they only exist on that hex they don't exert the zone of control of one hex around them which means i could fight them or i can just go around them exactly and at this point are you really going to waste time fighting them no so that was big shout out i guess to the second new zealand because they they managed to get what this all sort of culminated in is the seventh have all their cpa at the minute and are not pinned from either mechanically pinned or positionally from your guys yes you just yeah you've freed up your guys with that um i'm also going to give a shout out to the malady division for standing strong because it was a 15 loss and then they sacrificed another 10 to not retreat same thing happened on

the next one and then on the final one you you picked apart what was left of them so they stood strong all the way to the end didn't lose any ground but did lose everyone there yeah i mean The bloody division is effectively now gone, leaving just the shell. That's another one of my divisions taken apart by a very committed attack by you. You lost cohesion points making the last part of the attack. The second New Zealand started this upstage

with 10 cohesion, the outside still has four. The HQ unit. yeah but the infantry inside is less it's like minus now and something to make clear as well because i don't know how often we've actually touched on this in terms of the combat because it didn't come up very often at the start so when we wrap up combat so say it's you know my turn's over and it goes over to andy for his land stuff so he'll move all of his units and then if any of his units are within a hex a fight breaks out two uh no within a hex oh sorry sorry yeah if you're

Within A-Hex, if you're adjacent to any of my units, they have to fight because you're there. So you have to initiate the fight, you're the attacker. The fight resolves, and then at the end of that, you've satisfied the requirement for a fight. The turn can end, the upstage can end. However, you can also choose to repeat all the steps again of your part of the upstage in terms of the fighting mechanic. So you can then go for a fight again in the same place, or if you have had a unit who's ended their movement within two hexes of an enemy so they don't need to have been involved in a fight just within two hexes so outside of a zone of control

they can move yes and at that stage that could trigger another fight and as long as by the end of a phase of combat a phase of land movement everyone adjacent to someone has fought then you can either wrap it up there or you can in theory do that until the cows come home or until your cohesion forces a surrender and there's nothing to do anymore yeah you can just keep on going so that's what we mean by a second phase of of land movement a second phase of combat yes because i guess that when you're talking about the rules and people are like you do all of it and then you loop upstage, and then it's repeat all of that three times.

One of the things inside that can be an infinite recursion. Yeah, so to boil down the bracket of how the turn works, you've got the full turn. The turn has three upstages wherein all of these things have to happen three times.

But each upstage, we can each on our turn repeat the land movement segment over and over in perpetuity until we're either bored have a tactical resolution or we the guys die off cpa basically yeah if we run out of ammo or the game resolves itself in a way that there can't be another fight so that that's what's happened and towards the end of this we found that those repeat phases are happening more and more because we just want to keep on going they're also so useful because you can get someone

and then you can be like if this fight goes well this is how they'll react yes um and cohesion refreshes at the end of an op stage it does not refresh at the end of a phase cpa cpa what cohesion oh shit that's going to confuse things forget that part scratch that from the record um cohesion that doesn't reset um cpa does cpa resets at the end of each op stage but the full upstage, so being attacked also costs CPA. And potentially

if your unit gets attacked a bunch in the other player's turn, you could start if you're second in the upstage with no CPA. Oh yeah. So my guys that moved, the black shirts that moved around next to the gun unit, and the gun, they did move as well, the

garrison. So they are starting with a bit of a deficit. They've lost some CPA already. So then if they were to be attacked still in this op stage they are starting on the back foot because it's your part of the op stage yes but they are still suffering the the fallout from my part yeah and and that is an interesting point because the op stage isn't over no because i got to uh uh a triforce in the road yeah a bit of a tactical stalemate so because i freed up the seventh they can get

if they push themselves they can get to Brook they can also get to Bardia now yep my third option I'm weighing up is you've got four divisions clumped pretty close to each other and this will require

a rules check to see if it's even possible but if I move the 4th Indian and the 16th at the bottom of the escarpment and then I move the three guys at the top of the escarpment round we might potentially have a five versus five division fight which is another option I'm weighing up

now that would be certainly a cataclysmic end to the scenario where we end up having all of our well more or less all of our divisions clash against each other around the escarpment and fight which is kind of why I don't know

if it's a great tactical move but I am fighting it would be a lot of fun Because the thing is, if I take Tobruk, I'd win. Because you've got Siwa. If I take Bardia, I win. Sorry, if you take Tobruk, you win in general, as long as you can supply it to and from Cairo.

Which I guess I probably won't be able to, but I guess taking Tobruk will be... I'll count it, even if you get the Bueno. Okay, I see, I see. And if you take Bardia, you need to have Bardia, Sidi Barani, and Siwa. i think madalena all of which i'm the last one to go through yep you're the last one through madalena i could take that away from you yeah pretty easy but yeah so you've got a few different

scenarios here so you've got two win conditions you can go for or you can go for the secret third option the uh the bad ending which is where we all just die in a massive blood fight and the second upstage becomes the end of the scenario and the third upstage is the epilogue in which we crawl around the desert trying to get to a wind condition with no intact

divisions. Yeah, so we ended there because I was just weighing them up and we weren't ready enough. But, uh, end of this upstage and then next. I also just thought of something that could just be a hilarious fly in the ointment

for the end of this. as if it's just all five maps, like sand. Actually, sandstorm wouldn't be that bad for this at this point. Would it not? Because it would cancel the air out, but it would probably cancel it out for both of us. If it's on all the maps, yeah. Yeah.

Rain would be worse, maybe. Although, is anyone using roads at the minute? We're sort of in between the two roads. We're all on tracks at this point, yeah. Yeah, so that's not that much. Hot might be an issue just for breakdown. Breakdown wouldn't be great. I've not moved a whole lot this time, so I don't need to worry.

So I guess the land stage isn't going to be encumbered by weather. Potentially, there's no air. We might have done the last air stuff for the whole scenario. Yeah. Weirdly, when we start the full game, if a sort of astronomical level of bad chance happens, that keeps potentially true from the first turn. That's true.

That could always happen. a hundred so three hundred and thirty two tens of bad weather after the first yeah if all the upstages by chance of that i mean if that happens everyone listening by lottery tickets because we've broken probability something's going on yeah we have to we should figure that out actually and see what the odds are of that happening but i think it would be i think it would be one of those things where it's like oh this number is actually more than all of the atoms in the universe like you know when like when you shuffle a deck of cards we're hitting like factorial stuff like it's it's to the point where it's so unlikely it's more likely that we'd phase through the table

while trying to rest against it and play the game yeah so yeah if that happens and he's you know what at that point we're not buying lottery tickets i'm just angry we get to the end of the game we don't got to do any air stuff well that's one of my favorite parts i am glad we have all the weather now and correctly not we have we've actually had a sandstorm the the only other uh fun little uh easter egg that i came across today was you divulge what was happening in siwa yes yes this is a little one uh for everyone uh after the long range desert group were basically useless they just need stores and water once a turn but because they weren't doing anything um they've been sitting at seaware for like the last two or three days and then i'll place down on the map so

i never knew they were there yeah but they've just been hiding away in seaware in the oasis we were saying because the seaware oasis is right next to the bottom of the map but the bottom of the map has that the great libyan sand sea bit and i just like to picture the long way desert group we're just using seaware to go and explore that desert and not involved in that well i was telling knew as well, one of my plans was, as I was weighing up my land movement, do I motorize one of my guys and just dart them down to Seaward and fight your few guys that you have

there? Which would have been funny, because I would have if I killed those guys, you would have also then had to reveal I'd by chance, also by circumstance... You've killed Bagnall! I just killed the long-range dozen of the bros. So that would have been a funny easter egg, but at least

I know where they are. They're out of sight. Not quite out of mind, because I guess they might still do something. but at this stage, what would that look like? They've never done anything yet. They're not going to pull that out the back now. I don't know if it's just because they rolled badly and I got this impression,

or they're just, the way it's designed, they're not particularly useful. I don't see myself using them until the SAS arrive for the main game. Yeah, they've been terrible. I'm sorry to say, but your history segment is wrong. Yeah, it also costs... To create it, you have to spend a toe

from a recon unit which are usually really good all my recon units have 45 cpa i don't know if yours are 45 yeah mine are like 30 i'll double check but i think all my most

of my armored car units have 45 cpa whoa and they tend to be like two assault free defense or free assault for defense they also tend to be the heaviest hitters.

That's wild. You know, division. Yeah, I mean, that's a high rate. And with that CPA, that's just diabolically scary. You can move them anywhere, really. Well, that's why they went and got the Seaweigh. Because it was like,

just go do that. Also, we'll need to look at you can upgrade them. To be what? There's rules, armoured cars in particular have upgrade rules after a certain turn. Oh, okay.

I haven't seen that. So, yeah. And they're already scary as shit. I'll watch out for that in the main game then. That's not fun. Well, Andy, we're nearly done with Upstage 2. There's going to be one big move by the sounds of it from you

and then after that, we're on the home stretch. Yes. How are you feeling? good about the game in general the situation I don't know if I feel good but I'm excited this is like the good this is a good point

in a competitive game where it's like the rules have kind of sort of not fallen away they obviously inform everything but we don't have to worry about the large scale of it anymore we can kind of throw the book out when it comes to trucks when it comes to long

form planning nowadays just get to the end get to the objective i can defend it with all my might you can attack it with all your might yeah and we don't need to worry too much about what happens in five weeks time or 10 years time we can just worry about what happens next week yeah and i'm also super thrilled it has built to a crescendo so i was a bit worried when we were finishing up stage three or two and five that this might end up with like the wall i'm just slamming against it but it holds i don't make any progress you don't make any progress and the last turn doesn't have any effect far from it i do have far from it based on that more faith on the the longevity of the game

i think maybe the game rules do hold up for pendulum and for change of strength i think it means that the game can actually ebb and flow in a way that it needs to to run as long as it does so I think my opinion is at the moment the game state I don't know who's going to win which is great I want the uncertainty I want the excitement and I'm

enjoying it as it is day to day now every time we're playing I'm having a fun time it's the opposite of the complaint of why I don't like Monopoly which is you do the first few turns and they're exciting and then it's a massive tail and you just know

who's going to win so i'm glad it hasn't fallen into that trap far from it i'm excited to see where this goes but there is not much time left it's it's last innings it is it's right before the buzzer we've got the end of upstage two then it's one final upstage that is that is wild and we'll yeah i guess we'll pick up the gameplay next time yep for now we will take a step back from the map we'll take a breather and we'll delve into that mailbag yeah see what you folk have got to say about this whole bit of shenanigans let's have a little delve into that big burlap sack and what do we have here it's an email from linus i believe that's the pronunciation l-i-n-u-s

seems right apologies if it's not correct us if not linus or linus if that is correct the arrival is the title of the email hello y'all love it y'all and greetings from sweden and one of your younger listeners my name is linus and i have just caught up with the latest episode a few days after my 17th birthday after half a year of listening and i'm finally writing an email well just think at that current pace you'll be able to write emails up until your retirement age by the time we wrap up yeah it's an exciting prospect look back upon the the golden age of your life and remember what you were doing back then how you uh i suppose wasted your youth listening to this we don't know if he was doing something productive while it was on

possibly but i mean you can only pay attention so much to this and also do something productive if you're writing an email you've paid attention and if you paid attention you're not doing anything worthwhile and that's a message to all of us the podcast has inspired me to learn the game myself and it is not as complicated as i thought that is well to hear but that might just be because i've yet to read the air rules air rules aren't as complicated as it's made out to be the the book does make reference to them being complicated but they're actually not no i've They're one of the really very simple parts. It is very much just one-on-one dogfight

or, like we said before, count up your bombs, drop your bombs. Yeah. So, you know what? If you found the rest of it fairly straightforward, you will actually have a pretty alright time with the rest. If you've read the logistics stuff and everything else, you'll be fine.

But don't finish before us. If you finish before us, we'll actually cry on mic. We'll just do that every week for the remainder of the time we'd spend playing the game. so bear in mind that will ruin whatever you're listening to while you do your thing i have a question will you publish the addenda you've created yeah yeah absolutely we will be doing that at some point we haven't come across many things to update in a while now because so much of it the addenda stuff that we found we need to correct

is quite glaring parts of the game it's it's either designation of units or it's rules that contradict themselves directly when it comes to stuff like land movement or combat and i imagine we we've also been in a fairly a chunk of rules we understand fairly well so um we might run into them again when i start looking at commonwealth production and you're looking at the you know how you get a certain amount of automatic airplanes from malta stuff from the north coast and the malta stuff will be interesting that uh some of the um any of the mechanics that come in later in the game based on just units that i have uh movement types my equivalent of the sas and like the commandos yeah desert commandos yeah that kind of stuff maybe there'll be some stuff in there but

we definitely will publish that at some stage we should have a read over i think when we finish the scenario i think maybe put it up before we start so people can see what addenda we are working with that's a good idea we should do that and maybe even refresh everyone's memory of the addenda that came with the game yes that's probably a good idea another unrelated question is if you will post any pictures from the live show on the website i unfortunately can't come so i wonder if you had any plans on sharing what happens there uh oh yes this came in before the live show of course um so we do have at the moment the live show is only available on tiktok it's the full thing it's a full recording of the whole thing on our tiktok page which

it just what were the mates we're getting it uploaded to youtube soon we're just we've figured out some storage stuff so it should be there actually pretty quick well we're not committed for certain but soon next couple of weeks we we really hope so you can see it all there it was a really fun time and thanks again for everyone who came along that listened you guys were great um so yeah keep an eye out for that and now for something completely different one thing that struck me during world war ii the railways were completely dominated by steam trains think of the massive quantities of water that they drink and the mountains of coal they eat very poetic by the way i like that a lot and the fact that in some rare places german world war

two era steam trains are still operational and used is astounding i will return soon i like that a nice little sort of stinger there in amongst it from your subtle humble and brave swedish friend linus thanks very much for that line yes um lovely that you're spending your youth listening to us we're very flattered and when it comes to the the train stuff because we only get a small section of that cut out in the game which is just the one railroad and it's all weirdly it's one of the bits of the game that's just incredibly automatic yeah it doesn't ask for coal it doesn't they could have easily been like well you need coal points that you can only get from certain towns or cities and the coal takes five cpa to load in and it you know if

there's evaporation hot weather the cool's less effective because the water differential it feels like there's a version of this game that started with the train rules it's like an alternate reality richard big didn't do the map he did the train if he was yeah if he was one of those guys really into trains yeah then maybe it would have been a train game instead but unfortunately his hyper fixation and special interest is everything well he did make a bunch of other games so i wonder he did but this is really his magnum this is yeah you can't you can't really go back from this into any other direction no i guess not once you've done this that's it but maybe let's have a look see if he's got any games that are like actually short he might he might we should have if this was

like a parody slasher you want to do your mega games he is the ultimate one stop it he maybe actually didn't like i don't know we'd have to look into it like yeah let's see if we can find some of his other games all right yeah maybe we'll maybe we'll pick that up in the hiatus we'll we'll learn another complicated war game in the end but thank you for that linus and um yeah best of luck growing up yeah and stop learning to play the game you've got better ways to spend your youth thrive grow as a person form your frontal lobe without the campaign for north africa becoming part of it i don't know what that does to a person's psyche uh but we have a another email we do from callum uh it's titled new listener it is hey gents i've

been listening to you for a couple of weeks now on episode 13 and things are starting to make progress i'm intrigued to know if by episode 75 you finally had anyone contact you we have thank you we've had we've had plenty but thank you when you catch up to this and if you started the main game or finished any of the shorter scenarios yet we're almost there nearly almost that was episode 75 so that's nearly 10 episodes ago so uh yeah nearly we've we've nearly started playing the game yep uh i'm trying to convince a mate to play with me on tabletop sim he's slowly getting convinced stop what are we doing to these people callum stop don't do it if you caught up by now i i fear it's probably already too late i feel like we've been doing it

we're doing this so you don't have to and people are going that looks fun what you've got to bear in mind is when we're recording the episode afterwards this is the the release at the end of it so unless you're setting aside like a couple of hours after each play session to sit and and wax lyrical about it this won't be as jovial a situation and bearing in mind a good third of these episodes i'm in a bad mood so factor that in callum but if you do decide to go ahead i guess all power to you have fun but yeah we've done it let us know how it's going as well any major faux pas you've had in the preparation of the game you'd recommend avoiding um at least playing digitally we can save the board etc saving the hours of setup i would like

to buy the physical game however it looks to be about 1k on the usual auction sites um yeah i mean it's expensive we bought it for around that it was expensive yeah we i mean we committed to a project that's going to last a lifetime but if you're doing this knowing you might drop out at some point based on friends availability i mean the podcast was an accountability tool to keep us going it's been a lot of fun but we needed it there to actually play the game and i guess also we were fine sort of devaluing the game because we're trying to do something with it yeah we've covered it i would recommend like if you can play on the tabletop i think it's a cool thing to own for any board game collector oh as a collector it's a massive piece if you try to play the game

you're going to just destroy the value of it the collector's piece so i guess weigh that up yeah not to discourage but if the tabletop sim works i'd go for that the tabletop sim is probably a good way to dip your toes in the water and if it is something you really are interested in i think give it a go go for it yeah in terms of occasionally pop up we keep an eye out they occasionally pop up for like less where someone clearly doesn't every yeah every few weeks you'll see a copy of it and every few months there's one that starts at a fairly low bid yeah ours started kind of low and the one we bought to be fair sold less than some of the ones that go nowadays yeah the one we got was just shy of a thousand and some of them are like one and a half so it's

you know it can't be costly i would say the biggest faux pas and it sounds like a cop-out and it sounds like i'm getting a little bit too philosophical but was maybe starting the game if you're committing to playing this bearing in mind if you're spending that kind of money on it it's a big old game to play the novelty is there at the start the novelty really

wanes quite quickly you'll be shocked at how quickly it does after you've learned the rules and when you start playing the disparity between those two periods of time is crazy I will say when we were reading the rules it's honestly

like obviously read the rules over but i wouldn't if you're gonna go in we probably spent too much time doing the like white box scenarios and stuff where it was like i don't actually think they helped because they're contextless and i think unfortunately the thing with board games all board games is read the rules and then start playing and they'll make sense to you that's a very good thing to say actually i think yeah maybe remove any practice white box stuff if you're going to do a practice thing i think maybe if you want to just get a feel of the game you want to try it out do this scenario i think graziani's offensive is a really fun scenario you don't have to worry about too many units bogging it down the conditions to win are kind

of simple and it's and it's enough room to pendulum from what it's also not one of those super late like the rommel scenarios they seem to start you have a ton of units that already in like fighting positions yeah i'd i'd recommend i think the scenario graziani's offensive is probably the one to start with we can only speak to one scenario it's this one yeah and to be fair based on what we know of the game i think this is your best shot if you finish that first of all wow and secondly at that point if you want to continue playing maybe that's when you do if i wasn't doing this and I got to the end of the scenario in a few weeks whenever we finished this,

I would probably give myself a pat on the back and go, that was crazy that we played that. Cool experience. Let's never do that again. I'm putting this away in a cupboard and never touching it again. I'm selling this for whatever I can now. It's punched, but you know, nevermind.

Yeah. That would be it. Final part. Are there any other war games you guys would be interested in playing now that you've started playing the most famous one? not i think if we finish this i wouldn't be against a mid board game like a mid war game where it might take two or three sessions like that kind of thing i'm not doing what is it code

blue that's like the one blue i think whatever we joke about like rerunning it but realistically i think you get one big war game for your life to like figure out um and we've picked this one unfortunately i i genuinely don't know if i would play another war game like another war game i think i'd play one if it was in the war game i guess then it's not a war game if you can finish it and then after it's yeah probably just a board game i guess i don't know how i feel about this right now i think i might have to revisit this question in a little while maybe when we're a few weeks into the full game because right now i feel like i'm at the end of this and i it's you know i know deep down that isn't the case i'm just starting it's it's not even the

full game yet but it is a milestone we're hitting i'm getting this like sense of relief in my body and mind where i'm kind of worried it's like you know when people retire after working till they're like 85 and then just and they stop working then they just die like two weeks later yeah i kind of worry i'll have that okay i'll stop thinking about it for too long and i just i'll cease to function so i don't think delving into another war game i think that's as damaging i also certainly don't want to do it while we're playing this because i don't know real confusion or being like i swear it's this and then it's like oh that was from some other game like because i will like we do that with dnd when we've gone from 5e to the 2024 edition where sometimes it'll be like i'm doing

oh damn it i'm thinking of a feature i would have had in the last edition i also can't play with anyone other than you because i know if i played with anyone else and it would it would be such an innocent thing to say but at any point if i just i sort of went oh sorry i've got this confused because i'm playing the campaign for north africa as well i'd look like such a dickhead yeah that just sounds like such a wanky i'm better than you oh sorry i'm confused because i'm playing the really long one that no one's finished before supposedly and i'm like right okay that you're just showing off i'm like no dad i don't mean to i don't know that one either i'm sorry i didn't enjoy the avengers with you i've been watching a lot of like 1920s french films recently it's like

fuck off yeah oh sorry i've slipped into my french accent because i watched them so often no you haven't but i would mean it innocently i can't play forza horizon because i've been grinding desert bus oh that's a game what a hey that that is the that is the the video game equivalent of this game. Just if you strip back all of the complexity and just keep the length. It's just, is it left or right? It's a specific... It drifts right. So you just tap left every... Every now and then

you have to like hold down for a few seconds and let it go. Oh man. That game's on my mind now. But thank you Callum, thank you Linus, and thank you everyone else who's emailed over. As you'll know from the context of those, we're getting through some emails that came in just before the live show.

So by all means, fire stuff over. We'll have a hiatus between the practice run and the full game we won't be completely gone we'll still be releasing episodes every single week don't worry about that we'll just be working on how to streamline everything in between how we're going to structure the the full podcast i mean the segments will still be the same but how we're going to make sure you guys can see all of the the pictures the map properly the sheets give you some real coherent updates throughout so we'll work on some bits and pieces and also mail during that time so fire anything over you want to the email is

info warwithamate.co.uk the instagram if you want to follow that is just warwithamate the website will be getting a revamp when it comes to the full thing it's warwithamate.co.uk and keep an ear out because as we wrap up the scenario we'll be trying to make this hiatus as as big a thing as possible, and the big finale and the big start will be two big milestones, and we want you there for it, so watch this space for what's going to make that up.

But that's what's coming. Thank you very much for that. That is the future, Andy. It is. And this game isn't about the future. This isn't Cyber Desert 2077. This is the campaign for North Africa. So to keep the

verisimilitude of what we're doing, the only way to do so is to go Into the past We've got to go back History The men of the long range desert patrols Were quite a sight on their return to Cairo From a month's trip to Libya

The contrast between the east and west of the Nile Is very marked In the east At this point I gave little thought to my future But I'd always be interested in boats in the sea I am more or less in the position of a cactus In a land of shit telegram which is on point of sinking because errors are present we are absolutely not qualified

to share views on history so andy where and when are we we are well we'd be running up to world war one we have it's been in our process found out why the british the italians and the ottomans got involved yeah they've all made some missteps they've all been doing their best to either keep a treaty in place or undercut a treaty. Most would be doing both. A lot of secret treaties as well. Yeah, which is a bad way to keep a treaty, because you kind of need to know they exist to keep them

in function. Yeah. So we're going to figure out what happened to the various guys who got involved, and we're going to start with the Ottomans. Ah, a classic. I've been enjoying their tale. Yes. Well, I guess we'll see how it ends. Oh, dear.

We'll start. this is a poem from the diary of Mehmed Fashu who was in the Ottoman army at Gallipoli this is from his diary 27th October 1915 Graves, graves lie open throughout the world

lightning has blighted the rose gardens soldiers, soldiers have become corpses, heroes are now carrion for wild beasts I like it, I like it it's painting some pretty grim imagery but i guess that's what's going on right now oh it is so world war one is fought between 28th of july 1914 and 11th of november 1918 between allied powers britain france russia

with late additions from the u.s and italy against germany austria and the ottoman empire between 65 and 74 million soldiers are mobilized for this conflict across the globe wow that's more than i thought yeah to put it in perspective the world population at this point is about 1.8 billion so that's a hefty chunk then yeah it's about five percent yeah um it's shit yeah it's a lot of guys roughly 48 million for the allies and 26 million for the central powers an estimated 9 to 11 million soldiers died when you include civilian fatalities caused by starvation disease and genocide the total rises to between 15 and 20 million and that's not the most devastating thing that's happening at this point fuck okay i'm kind of scared to see what

that's going to be because i've excluded the spanish flu which crops up at the end of world war one right okay that kills an estimated 17 to 50 million possibly up to 100 million people sorry what the fuck is that scale 17 to 50 and then potentially up to 100 because there's a world war going on documentation shit so how many of them have been sort of lost in amongst the wall yeah how many have been 50 millions maybe the like mid point of that estimation range but it's that's what i'd like to think if i'm taking that swing between the two but i guess with that hundred million are we is that being looked at from the perspective of that many people are dead and we just don't know what the cause was based on everything lost in amongst

it countries weren't doing censuses people were disappearing because of the war it's just a horrible time to keep track of so around this time have we got a hundred million dead people we just don't know what the causes of death are amongst the pool of dead yeah well to continue uh between if you take world war one and the spanish flu together between 65 million and 122 million people lost their lives between those two events fucking hell so yeah you've got another 22 million leeway beyond yeah which is probably the war because they were up to 22 so you're Looking at 10% of the world died. 3.9 to 6.8% of all the people alive died within this five-year period.

God almighty, that is... That's not a figure I've ever heard. And that makes that period of history just absolutely terrifying. Yeah, and these two things directly feed into each other because you've got millions of soldiers in cramped, unhygienic conditions like trenches the bowels of transport ships yeah prisoner of war camps perfect breeding grounds for any disease let alone one that's hyper contagious and you've also got people rotating in and out from the front so taking it back home or taking it back out of the front to the front yeah from

the front it goes to enemy soldiers back to their home country yeah back to wherever they're occupying yeah plus you've got widespread malnutrition starvation and injury which is weakening people's resistance to the disease i mean yeah we we heard about the stuff in in just britain alone yeah about the threshold for a competent person for warfare and if you're not competent to fight in a war i can't imagine you're competent to fight off a disease either no and it gets exacerbated because most people didn't know the spanish flu was happening when it was happening do we have or do we have years on this that are coming as to the span of the spanish flu um i think it's 1917 or 18 and then it's a few years yes right on the back end yeah

that's something i've yeah i've got no scale for that at all spanish flu part of the reason they didn't know this was happening was because every country involved in the war had strict control of the media through legislation for example the british had passed the defense of the realm act and the united states had the sedition act but every country had their own version of it yeah where they could control the media for the war effort so it's all propaganda and none of it is oh hang on a minute everyone's really fucking sick well they don't want to publish information about the flu because it will affect morale and production and imply they're weak to their enemies so the only country where any of this is coming out is spain because it's neutral

hang on a minute i kind of see where the name is coming from here yeah because it didn't originate in spain i thought as much various theories for where it originated one is the trenches another is kansas kansas yeah there was just a disease that originated in kansas and then that's interesting spread but regardless it's called the spanish flu because they were they were reporting on it at the time nothing to do with the origin of it so as well as the cost of human lives of world war one also saw the death of four empires uh the first one we'll cover is the ottomans they as had been recent form uh for the last few centuries were having a bad time They're fighting on four fronts

Four? Yeah The first is they're fighting the Russians in the Caucasus Mountains Which is a nightmare battlefield I think fighting on any mountain You don't want that To give you a sense This mountain range is

Roughly 1,250 to 1,500 kilometres long And most of the fighting was happening on plateaus that are an average of 1,500 to 2,000 meters above sea level. So the altitude there is crazy. These problems are also exacerbated by the fact

that Envar Pasha tried to launch an assault over these mountains into Russia in winter, which is a historically bad idea. I hope no one does that again. One group, from what I know, have ever pulled that off. and that's the mongols who are history's great exception well at least no one tries this again later in history dozens of times um surely not in another world war though that would be crazy yeah i guess people who don't learn history or do therapy well no one would do this who's

been in a world war certainly not the one we're talking about now surely not so here's some more descriptions from diary entries these are all from february 13th 1916 from the memoir of memet arif olsian an ottoman soldier fighting russia on this front these i just want to remind you are all from the same day i was just about to say yeah you said all of them are from 13th of february this is snippets from one diary entry that i've like picked out. Are they all just screams written down? The blizzard is continuing in all its fury.

The sun has probably risen but it is impossible to see ten paces ahead. The blizzard, the storm, two long days and two long nights. We are tired to the point of exhaustion. Another part of this same entry. Our three hour climb had

come to an end. We joined the regiment and settled into the trenches that were assigned to us. They're doing trench warfare. 2,000 meters above sea level in a mountain range how fucking low are these guys digging uh yeah

and this is the order they get I recall the order that had been sent by the army high command your positions represent the honor of the army they are in the center of the division and are your graves that's an order

they got sent that's not an order that's a really fucked up promise Yeah. So this campaign goes horribly, as you can imagine, for the Ottomans. I thought as much. It would have gone so much worse, but the 1917 Russian Revolution happens, and that pulls Russia out of the war completely. The Russians probably, if the revolution hadn't happened, would have got to Constantinople before the end of World War I.

God. While all that's going on, you've also, they're fighting the British in the Middle East for control of oil fields and the Suez Canal. The British went into what's currently the south of modern-day Iraq. This is one of the few Ottoman victories during all of World War I, something called the Siege of Kut al-Amara, where the British army is entirely surrounded and captured. Oh, wow.

The British do manage to regroup, and by 1917, they take control of the region and secure the oil fields. What do you mean, regroup? I thought they were surrounded. Send in another army. Oh, right. I think they slinked around from inside. No, they all get captured and then they send in another army and get those guys out and continue. So they surrounded the surrounding forces. Yeah.

While this is going on, the Germans also, with the help, sorry, the Ottomans with the help from the Germans, launch a raid across the Sinia Desert against the Suez Canal. that's the east bit of egypt you know past the nile there's that like little bit that goes down between the arab peninsula and africa yes yes that's the sinner desert and the attack through that okay that's a nightmare oh yeah just going off hexes on the map it's off the map yeah but going off like that environment around there no it's that's not a nice place to push through well this is the area bagnell drove through to get to petra oh you know where they were really struggling yeah you know the why all the wire i mentioned that was in the desert and

was like whipping up under the cars and causing all the problems yeah that's why are they laid to get their troops across the desert here wow so they it's there for 20 years it's probably a lot it's still there now but this is the what bagnard's dealing with in the 30s oh wow so we're setting up some prequel info here yeah the british repel this attack and then push north and eventually capture uh north and east and eventually capture jerusalem in december more diary entries here these are from the diary of isman turjman an arab soldier who fought in palestine this is a quote i thought just like the sentiment of i cannot imagine myself fighting in the desert front and why should i go to fight for my country i'm ottoman by name only for my country as the whole of humanity

i like that that is yeah that's a really profound diary entry yeah that and the put they were just found some weirdly profound diary entries from ottomans at the time that i wonder if it is that like sort of strange culmination of so many different cultures within the ottoman empire where you get these kind of weirdly beautiful snippets where they're so kind of thought-provoking and weirdly unified in their sentiment. Whereas take what a diary entry would be now if everyone went to war

and you just get like a guy from Britain. Well, it'd be TikToks. Does anyone have a diary anymore? Everything would just be so dystopian and cynical. so yeah this is what the ottomans are like the arabs were fighting for the ottomans are thinking about when they're being sent to fight the british so um this is a further bit of the same diary entry um our leaders promised us and other fellow arabs that we would be partners in this government and that they seek to advance the interests and conditions of the Arab nation.

But what they have actually seen from these promises, had they treated us as equals, I would not hesitate to give my blood and my life. But as things stand, I hold a drop of my blood to be more precious than the entire Turkish state. So that's the morale of the Arab soldiers being sent to fight by the Ottomans. Wow, and I thought the morale in the game was bad when it was minus three. you're sitting like a minus four there this attitude also explains why the ottomans had to deal with the third front they're dealing with which is the arab revolt between 1916 and 1918

where arab nationalists rebelled against turkish rule backed by the british one of the british here is t lawrence aka lawrence of arabia oh i see yes in return for this revolt against the ottomans the british promised hussein bin ali the sheriff of mecca an independent pan-arab kingdom stretching across the middle east in exchange for leading a revolt against the ottomans see how that works out for them i think they did a film about this yeah they also had to fight at gallipoli which is the straits of dardanelle where winston churchill was conceived uh was convinced if they took the conceived wow what a hectic night that was he was around here this is when he's uh first lord of the sea oh my god but he's convinced if they take the dardanelles they'll just destroy

the ottoman empires get ships into the black sea uh relieve russia in his head this is the like i win this i win the wool world war one basically the great war at the time it's one of the only victories the ottomans had in world war one so they were the ottomans were led by uh mustafa kemel atatürk uh who also fought the um italians in libya he was one of the you know the guys who disguised themselves to go through egypt oh yeah he's one of these guys okay um and he's in charge of this defense and it turns him into a national hero uh which will lay the groundwork for modern turkey in a lot of ways here's an order he gave to the 57th infantry regiment i do not order you to fight i order you to die in the time which passes until we die other troops and commanders

can come forward and take our places so between that and the high command from the ottomans it's a very bad vibe like it's a very negative like i'm hearing a lot of orders to die to die yes this is your tomb this is where you'll die yeah your job is not to fight it's to die and then it's just contrasted with the like sentiment of like the world is my country the like poetry this is horrible yeah uh the regiment he gave that order to had a hundred percent casualty rate oh wow they followed orders yeah everyone either killed or wounded jesus british ships failed to take the straight from the sea so the australian and new zealand army corps or the anzacs uh land on the 15th of april 1915 the ottoman resistance blunted the

attacks and it entered trench warfare because that's what happens in world war one that was the trend back in the day if you're in the mountains if you're not wherever you are bring a shovel bring your pals so they're fighting a trench war from april to december that year when the allies realize they're not making any progress and do a complete stealth withdrawal and like manage to leave and get back on their ships with no casualties from that and just leave it's just like oh there's some costs we're not paid we're going so while this wars going on there's internal tension and paranoia growing within the ottoman uh leadership unfortunately in particular feel of christian minorities uh that would side with russia and the

west against them uh so starting in 1915 they uh started a program of deportation and execution in the form of death marches uh this results in the displacement of roughly 1.5 million armenians as well as greeks and assyrians this is the armenian genocide if you've heard of it is their fear that they will turn against them which from i saw there wasn't a lot of seems paranoia driven rather than yeah yeah so by 1918 the ottoman empire is broken financially and militarily uh they signed an armistice on october 30th 1918 this agreement ends uh hostilities and led to the immediate Allied occupation of most of the Ottoman Empire outside Anatolia,

which is just modern-day Turkey for the most part. Yes. While also giving them a right to go into any territory in Anatolia they believe is having unrest, which is they'll just go in when they... We've heard this before. Yeah, this is something that we've been trying to set up for a long time. Yeah, it's the same pattern.

This creates a huge amount of contention, which is compounded by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which is another secret agreement. For fuck's sake. This one is a secret treaty between France and Britain in 1916 where they decide how they're going to split up the Middle East after the Ottoman defeat. So they decide the agreement made did not include any...

did not include a pan-Arab state stretching across the Middle East. So that was bullshit. Yeah, they're betraying them as they're getting them on side. They're making this secret deal with the French. So immediately. I think they're betraying them before they open correspondence or during correspondence. Yeah.

Just bad shit from the British. Bad. So this split gives France direct control over coastal Syria, Lebanon, and southern parts of Turkey, while the rest of syria was their influence but not direct control and then britain has a border to that which is their inter indirect control bit which is the rest of syria mostly and then they have direct control over monday iraq egypt etc and then they also set up the international brown zone which is palestine and israel today um which they set up as a international administration

due to the religious significance and it being complex. This whole secret agreement gets put into law in 1920, like international law. Yeah. So that just becomes how they slice it up. The reason that a lot of the Arabs

found out about this is because when the Bolsheviks took over Russia, they found this agreement in the archives and leaked it. Because they were like, this is funny, and leaked it to also cause pressure against their enemies.

So they also wanted to split up the Anatolian heartlands, which leads to the Turkish War of Independence between 1919 and 1922, led by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who fought at Gallipoli. He goes on to repel the invaders, abolish the Ottoman Sultanate, and establish modern-day Turkey in 1923. And that's the end of the Ottoman Empire. what a cataclysmic conclusion yeah wow fraught with poetry orders to die yeah would you believe it a secret treaty the orders just give a sense of how

grim the situation is i mean it's sort of a reflection of the state of of what's going on there that there isn't really a next stage and everyone kind of accepts it yeah that it's it's too far gone and that your your next order is perish that's it it's over we're here someone will take our place it's done but then also that weird aspect of i don't know if it's hope it doesn't seem like hope but the whole mankind is is my people and that feels like a hopeful like a hopeful message from someone who maybe didn't i don't even know is it hope though or is it just kind of a i think it's a rejection of definitely rejection of the empire a philosophical and i think it's a great quote it's a fucking awesome quote yeah it just i don't know is that one filled

with hope or is it a sort of last despair filled based on everything else moment of this isn't what i want yeah it's probably more of that this is this is the the reality but this isn't the regalia that i want to to have in the end this isn't what i want to fight and die for yeah i guess only only one person on the 13th of february knows yeah but uh man what a what an end to the ottoman we followed them a long way through british sneaker in no shop there yeah try to invade russia and win uh it's a perfect little snippet on your your empire's diary dying do the thing dying empires do go east when it's cold they're going north oh god yeah that's sorry oh man that's a that's that's an error that is that's some heroin stuff in there i mean we had

we had disease we had genocide that is just really on all sides the worst situation this is this is much worse than I even I knew it was bad but as I've been researching World War I it's so bad

the figures of the people that died nearly fucking you know you're looking at 7-8% of people who could have died globally

around this period is just staggering yeah if you think about that now well all that stretches up to what like

600 million people yeah you're looking at like the population of the United States yeah Just dying in the span of a few years It's also like What

The lethality of this Like if we'd done COVID But against Like what we did for COVID against the Spanish flu Yeah To post Like yeah God

Oh fuck me really You get some lightness in here The fruit zone alright Andy what could possibly be your fruit zone right now lychee or tomato oh great so it's also bad fuck you

fuck you lychee because I had an emerald iced tea once and it was really nice same I've been liking lychee recently alright the fruit zone what a fucking

rogue spot to put that in by the way that's insane all right cool uh beforehand you know i've been enjoying the game the last few weeks you've hit me with a really heavy history segment yeah sorry i found out that a 17 year old has been playing the game and finds it to be pretty easy to do and then you you drop that fruit zone so the the common ground now is is really gonna be tough so andy i'm gonna i'm gonna hand over to you it's it's time for common ground and now for something nicer a little oasis in the wall it's time for some common ground i'm trying to intro the common ground i'm recording maybe

common ground is of course the segment in which we as friends try to reunite as just that after a period of conflict a game session of war we pick a topic to discuss and come back together as united pals on it and this week andy it's your turn for the topic what are you bringing to the table. I've got a World Cup themed one. A bit like mine last week. Because it's ongoing and it's the biggest thing happening. This seems derivative but I'll allow it. What's happening?

Remove the bidding process for hosts or at least take it out of FIFA's hands. So, you've caught me in a situation here, Andy, where I wanted to agree with you. Oh yeah? I won't rebel too much against this.

Mostly because I don't care. You found a topic here, which is an interesting one, because it might be a bit of a pushover. I think you'll maybe have to sell me the negatives of not doing this. I've got some ideas for how I'd do it, I guess. Okay, so I know the bidding process exists. Well, it's just who can give the guy in charge of FIFA the most money. Is that the actual bidding procedure?

I guess not officially. But that is kind of what it is, because I know it's called bidding. Well, the last three have been Russia, Qatar, America. Right, okay. Yeah, I kind of see a bit of a pattern there. Yeah. So here's my thing. No more bidding on it.

The winner of the World Cup hosts not the next one, but the one after. Okay. So kind of a Eurovision thing. Yeah. My logic for this is if a team wins the World Cup, you can probably assume they have the football infrastructure in their country to host because they're good enough you can presume for the most part like

yeah and i think you give them another option well i've got two other options if they like can't host i don't want to okay uh offer it to other countries but the with a right of first refusal going second third fourth fifth etc okay so the guys that they go up against in the final and they lose if they want it they can have it they can go next okay okay third fourth which makes that third fourth position like game more important i guess other options they can share it with their neighbors i thought those two were better okay uh that that is that is up there how about a bit of a spin on this okay because if there's one thing that i get frustrated with quite frequently it's football and not because i'm a fan no i'm i'm the same boat uh there's

something about it and uh apologies if there's anyone who has a weird crossover on the venn diagram which feels like it's just two separate circles of people that enjoy this and people that are avid football fans maybe i'm wrong maybe some of you guys are big sports fans out there as well but there is something about the the culture of football and the pride around it that creates a a sort of hostility and i don't think that's great i don't want hostility i want a bit of you know a bit of peace that's why i got annoyed at the game i want i want peace so i think how about this to kind of throw things off a little bit the first team out hosts the next world cup

so like the first guys to be mathematically eliminated from their group have to host it is the host for the next world cup i guess it's like the because you do there is such a thing as home field advantage i think so it's sort of like yeah blue shell and mario kart where it's like you come and last well yeah there is it's it's uh you know it's kind of a handicap for the next time home field advantage what i do know is that uh supposedly mexico in the stadium that uh england played against them recently they mexico it's something like crazy where it's like they've won like 83 games and only lost like four games or something beforehand yeah in that arena the altitude apparently was a massive yeah because if you

listen to british pundits talking you'd think it like was several times higher than like everest yeah they're talking like you know like the mexico team of like trained without gas masks or sorry oxygen masks while doing like a climb up kilimanjaro when in reality it's it's just high and i know it's exhausting but the fact that we we beat them in that match makes me think well it can't be that crazy because i don't think any of our team are particularly well versed in high altitude football games no so it makes me think that is kind of bullshit maybe mexico have went up against lesser teams i don't know what the logistics are of that and i won't pretend to but that just sounds like a bunch of nonsense

so i think when it comes to this home field advantage if we can hand that off to the losing team it creates an interesting dynamic in two ways one you have teams that are ill-prepared maybe for the the world cup that are qualified and then they end up in the next world cup and because it's hosted in their country maybe they'll win or maybe not win but maybe they'll get a lot further or you get teams intentionally throwing a world cup for the first time in four years that they get to play so they can host next year we remove the monetary aspect like your suggestion but they do have to go through a four-year period of embarrassment where the team has to throw it so hard that they qualify but then fuck it immediately yeah

It's walking the line of qualify, but... And if they get into a cycle where one year they throw it and next year they win, then the next year they throw it and then they win, then you start to spot the pattern. Yeah. You start to see what's going on here. But is the home field advantage that much? Do they just want to bring in the economic boom

of hosting a World Cup? It adds a few more interesting factors to it. I don't know what your rebuttals on this are. I would say it might mean you end up having to play in a country that doesn't have the stadiums. Good. Because, again, I don't really care about the World Cup. So they can do that.

That's fine. They can play in someone's back garden for all I fucking care. You know what? I think with the World Cup, I'll watch it when it's on. I'll watch some England matches. if it slots into my schedule because the whole thing That's also been the problem with this World Cup

Normally if the World Cup or the Euros are on I'll like if we get out of the groups I'll sort of get caught up a bit and I might go to like a friend's house where they're watching the game or go to the pub while the game's on The last game started

at 1am It was my anniversary with me and my girlfriend, we went out for some some drinks and you know a nice time and we got back home and the match was meant to start at 1 a.m england and instead it got pushed back by an hour 2 a.m and at that point we stayed up we listened to some uh some music and stuff and it was a it's a great time and we're like all right we'll stay up we hyped ourselves up we're like all right we'll make a night of it and then the match started 10 minutes in we were asleep yeah into the play time so and and that was when we

were sort of hyped up for it we had time off the next day from work which was a big thing in my office at work where a load of people had moved around shifts or booked like a half day did you have anyone take the most obvious sick day ever we didn't but i i did kind of the opposite which was it ties into that in that uh it came out my my manager we had a meeting that day on the the friday and my manager had said look we're looking at maybe having a half day on monday for some people sort of a lottery almost so if you guys want to try and put in for a half day maybe you can have the morning off and i thought all right cool i'll do that and i wrote down i wrote down on my hand and i actually have a picture i can i can prove this to you andy i wrote down on my hand

a little code to memorize the winners of all of the World Cup from the last one all the way back to 1966 when England last won because I wanted to make sure that if I got called out for it you could pretend to be a football player

and here it is and I can show you so this picture as you can attest is just a picture of my palm with letters on it and I can tell you with that that it was Argentina, France, Germany spain italy brazil france brazil west germany argentina italy argentina west germany and i wrote that on my hand in case i put that in and they were like oh well you know

is anyone really a football fan putting this in and i could throw that out there i like how little of a good plan that is because they're like oh wow you know all the world cups you're a big fan uh what do you think of and they name any player from any era well what i would do there is i would because i i'm not quiet about what i do in my pastime at work people like what are you doing today like today at work what are you doing tonight i'm playing the campaign for north africa so people know that i've got a very uh you know set mindset on the things i like so i could have just been like look i i like to watch the football for the historical aspect of i don't i'm not into the players i'm not into the you know the goal scoring i'm just into the moment

in history let me tell you about history these are all the teams that have won um i never got asked i was never asked the question but what it did mean is i put in the half day so i got to have the morning off which means i went out for my anniversary i got a bit merry and i got to have a bit of time to recover in the morning and i don't care about the football it's worked out nicely and i guess that that boils down to what we were talking about i don't care if they play in a back garden i don't care if they play in a muddy field i don't care if i don't care if only 400 fans can fit in the stadium if that means that there are going to be less bothersome people from whichever country it is where you've got your football hooligans coming in we are and i don't

know if i'm being biased here we are probably the worst for it hooliganism yeah i don't actually know if there's another country worse for hooliganism i don't know if it's just because frequently maybe last world cup or euros or a fairly recent one is a bunch of it would have been the world cup that was in russia a bunch of british football hooligans went over and ran into like hard russian guys and it wasn't close yeah because in the uk you've just got you know kind of burly guys i get you know pissed up on the weekend watching the football and then it becomes a case of thuggery whereas in russia i think you have people who take my mouth guards to football games because they know they're gonna be fighting so i i think if if it means that the football

experience is humbled and it becomes about the game which is what i was talking about last week yeah my common ground was to remove diving from football because i think it lessens the game and it's tantamount to fraud i think it's the same merit here if you just make it about the game then maybe i'll give a bit more attention to what you're actually interested in yeah but right now the fan base has ruined it it's like rick and morty around season three the fan base has spoiled it i don't care anymore and if you try and talk to me about it i'll think less of you we also have the thing i don't know about you i on a certain level like resent football because i was never into it and it was the like key for like school socializing well that's definitely part of it for

me yeah we both ended up friends we both ended up playing the campaign for north africa we probably have similar childhood experiences yeah i think if we're going to dissect this psychologically i think i know where this has came from and that's why i also hazard a guess that i'm that's why i'm tending every listener with the same brush well i have like a first school memory of everyone running around being like i'm college like naming football players and because football is literally never on in my house i was like what who who are any of these people and then people like what you don't know that and then you go well fuck you then and then you're just not gonna like football so by that logic i think we should just make football about the game maybe then we'll be

more interested and i don't mean to keep to keep your own interest people but that that's what i'm that's exactly what i'm doing that's exactly what my common ground is i think football should be about the game and i think all of the nonsense should be you know set aside yeah so i don't know andy if i know i've warped your common ground slightly here but i think we both just the world cup's going on and we both have issues with football i think that's the common ground maybe if we take both of our common grounds and we distill it down into it should just be about the game itself and enjoy that but the game should be five days long yeah it's the first 11 goals well that's it you know if you take what we're doing you know we make it about the game we don't

add anything to it we don't talk about it afterwards in common ground we don't embellish with tangents we don't talk about other things kind of related to the game like pundits do where we talk about like you know the history of it or anything around that we don't you know hear you know fan opinions when they interview them outside the arenas and the stadiums we don't we don't pander to all of that nonsense we keep it clear-cut we keep it precisely about the game and I think the hypocrisy of football fans

when they, you know, kick up this fuss, it's just, it's tiring and I can't deal with it. I think if you're going to play the game, just play the game and stop going on tangents and yapping on about it. If you'd like to email us If we don't like football, I guess

I'm a bear about it. If you'd like to email us, you can catch us on info at warwithamate.co.uk Our Instagram is warwithamate our website is warwithamate.co.uk and that will be updated at some point but get in touch, let us know your thoughts War with a Mate on YouTube

War with a Mate is on YouTube as well, you can follow us on there we release all of the episodes on there might be releasing a live show soon well yeah, it's all the same stuff and we'll have the live show on there we've got the video of us unboxing the game for the first time which if you've not seen that that's a 10 minute or so video of us

realising what we're getting into for the first time that was fun so check it all out get in touch if you've got any questions about the game or as you've heard in the past anything at all, even tangentially related or not at all related we'll talk about it all

and we will pick up next time towards the end of this practice scenario, the culmination of 18 months of progress I've been James, I've been Andy stay subtle, humble and brave in those perfectly

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