Episode 6 Phil Yates/Savage Mouse Games

In this episode we talk to Phil Yates of Savage Mouse Games.  Phil is currently developing a new game, Angels One Six.  We talk to him about game design, his time at Battlefront miniatures working on Flames or War, Team Yankee and Angels One Six.

https://www.angelsonesix.com

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:15

Hey everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Tanks and Tomahawks podcast. This is Steve, and we have a special episode today. I had a chance to talk to Phil Yates. He is a game designer out of New Zealand. He is the owner and operator of Savage Mouse Games, and he has a new game coming out very soon called Angels 16. You might recognize Phil's name. He spent many years with Battlefront Games and uh worked on games like Flames of War, Team Yankee, and other games in uh Gale Force 9. And so it was a great privilege to talk to him, and I hope everyone enjoys the episode. So, Phil, one of the things that we always ask our guests is kind of their history and war gaming. And so for you, uh one, when, and uh how did you get uh into war gaming?

SPEAKER_01 1:06

Well, uh, you may recall the little ethics, um, soft plastic soldiers and so forth from way back when. So uh I was into those and making model kits of tanks and aircraft and so forth, but didn't really know what to do with them. I remember um setting up with a friend of mine this fair battle scene, World War I battle scene with Germans and trenches on one end and British in trenches on the other and tanks and so forth. Uh would have been about 10 feet by six on the um lounge floor, occupied most of the lounge. And then we got it set up and we're like, now what? Um so for quite a while it was just modeling and these are cool things, and I I like them. And then when I was about till 10 or 11, it was just before Star Wars came out, so that tells you sort of uh how long ago it was. Uh my mum heard on the radio, I think it was, um, about war gaming and uh said, Oh, there's this thing called war gaming, let's go to the public library and see if we can find some books or something. I was like, Oh, okay, that sounds interesting. Um, so yeah, we went to the public library and discovered um Charles Grant and Donald Featherston and all of those sorts of things. And um, yeah, that that got me into wargaming, and I joined the Christrich Wargame Society and was a member of those for a while, and that's how I started wargaming long, long ago.

SPEAKER_00 2:38

Wow. Well, your experience sounds very similar to mine. Um, we did have Air Fix, um, mainly the 176 scale, the smaller ones. And when I was a kid, you know, you could buy the big bags of the big cheap army men, but for whatever reason, I just uh became just super enamored with the 176 scale, and you could buy the little kits. It came in the little bubble pack, the the tank kits. Yeah, and uh yeah, I played that's how I I kind of got into war gaming too, very similar to you. I I was more of a modeler than you know, war gaming didn't know what that was. And I remember the same thing being my grandsparents' house and setting up, and it was funny because as I got older, I'd you know, I'd go over to my grandparents' house, my grandma'd be out in the yard working, and she would dig up these old little air fix figures from when we would be outside playing with them, and she's like, Yeah, I found another one of your old uh old army men. So uh yeah, very similar uh experience to you. And then at one point, I think uh it was probably Warhammer 40k. I ran it. I was in a game store or something, and I saw it. I was like, wow, you can you can actually play with your toys? Like, that's pretty interesting. That's I I'm I'm I'm down for that. So so very cool. So, you know, from just be becoming a war gamer, um obviously for you it became a a job. Um, obviously you worked for Battlefront for a long time. Um, how did that transition go from being just you know a hobby to actually making it into a career?

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Um well it was interesting because uh in the mid-90s, uh I moved to Wonganui um here in New Zealand, uh, which is a small town, um, because my wife wanted to do an art degree there. And um it was a very small gaming community there. And at that point I was working, playing around with a uh life-scale World War II game. And my wife said, that's really boring. Um, you should do something more interesting and exciting. So um Warhammer 40k third edition, I think, had just come out, and I saw it at the local hobby store and thought, oh, I'll have a look and see what this is about. Um, and uh ended up buying a copy and writing what was called uh Warhammer Panzer Battles for Warhammer Historical. Um and I actually had a contract with Warhammer Historical to uh publish it, and I got it to the point where I thought it was in a pretty good state and went in 2000 to uh our Natcon, which was in Hamilton that year, and ran some demos because World War II gaming had completely died. Um there was literally nothing happening, and since that was my main area of interest, I wanted to revive it. So I was doing demos there and having quite a lot of interest. This was with um the old FX scale or Revell, you know, between 176th and 172nd, you you had to take what you got back then, yeah, even at that stage. And um running demo games and um Battlefront were just a little bit off to the side, and they had their big display of 15 millimeter stuff, which is 1100, so a lot smaller than the stuff I was playing with. And um Pete and Colin came over and said, Can we have a game? So I said, Sure, don't mind, no problem. We had a game, and um then the next day they came back and said, Would you like to write a set of rules for us? And I was like, uh, I'm still working on these and it's gonna take a while and it's a lot of work. They said, No, no, we'll pay you. I was like, uh, yeah. And they said, no, seriously, look, tell you what, come up to Auckland, we'll um put you and your wife up in a hotel for the weekend and we'll have a big talk about it. By the end of the weekend, I was asked my wife, look, can I take a year off just to write this um set of rules for these guys? They'll be paying me half of what I'm earning at the moment. But you know, you've you've taken a few years off for your art degree, it's the same sort of thing. She was like, Oh yeah, okay. So that year off turned into 25 years. Um, and that's how I got started with Battlefront and had a lot of fun with um Flames of War and then Team Yankee and so forth. And then for the last five years I was there, I was um, well, even a little more than that, I think, but I was um doing uh board game design with Gale Force Nine. So yeah, that's how I got into it in a professional.

SPEAKER_00 7:11

Yeah, so I think back then Battlefront at that point was just more of a miniatures company, correct?

SPEAKER_01 7:17

Um they had just done a deal with um I can't even remember which company it was, but uh in the States to write them a uh set of rules. But when they and they actually changed their name to Battlefront to match the rules, which were going to be called Battlefront, um because they'd recognized that having miniatures without rules wasn't really very productive, and there were no widely successful World War II rules at the time. Here, the the most successful were um rapid fire, but even they weren't particularly popular here. So they got this set of rules written and decided they really, really didn't like it. Um, and so asked me to write something else because um Warhammer uh Panzer Battles was closer to what they were looking for, and the result was um yeah, Flames of War, which was, as you say, designed to sell the miniatures they already had and allowed them to do more.

SPEAKER_00 8:22

Yeah, yeah, and I I remember that rule say this Battlefront, World War II. Uh the individuals that were part of it, they there's a line of rules called Fire and Fury, which are mainly you know blackout or civil war.

SPEAKER_02 8:34

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 8:35

Um and I and I remember that game and it was super crunchy. It was very uh tedious um for the time. Probably matched back in that time frame a lot of the games that were out there. Um but but it's funny to hear you say like World War II gaming was dead, and now with just I mean, you could almost say it's probably one of the more dominant eras. Um, especially I think for just the general gamer, people that maybe don't want to get into I always think Napoleonics is like the hardest game period to for entry just because there's so many rules and scales and things, it's just hard to just drop into uh Napoleonics.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

But I'd like to do something about that because it's one of my future games with Savage Mouse Games, but not for quite yet. I've got some ideas on that one.

SPEAKER_00 9:24

Yeah, yeah. So uh for you, I I'd be interested. We've talked a lot on this show, just kind of the different game designers and how things have changed when you look back into the 70s, eighties, and then 90s, and you know, we always talk about this is this is the golden age if you're a war gamer, um, as far as game rule sets available, as far as miniatures, you know, all the things that you didn't have reference material. When you first started with Battlefront, and kind of previous to that, when you were working on the game for uh Warhammer Storicals, what's the biggest change or shift you've seen from now to today as far as wargaming rules? Just, you know, I think a lot of people talk about people's attention span and trying to tailor things for people nowadays.

SPEAKER_01 10:13

Yeah, I think one of the biggest changes has been the rise of skirmish gaming. Um Private AirPress's um War Machine was uh came out a few years after, literally a couple of years after Flames of War. And uh it was the first of the modern skirmish games. And now uh skirmish games are very dominant. If you look at what's coming out at any point in time, um a very high proportion of them are skirmish games. The number of successful new large-scale games um is relatively few, and that's partly because they're caught between um um games workshops products, um and then flames of war in the historical era, and then if you're into um 18th century, 19th century stuff, the Napoleonic period, the American Civil War, and all the other um stuff of that period, you've got the huge uh scattering of the market. You've got three major scales, you've got absolutely no agreement on um what a good rule set would look like, you've got the people who want to play almost board games with the grand historical I want to play the whole of Waterloo in an afternoon, and the people who want to write down to the people who want to be a um brigade commander and have um you know all the crunchiness of maneuvering their battalion into square and back into line and all of that sort of thing, and everything in between. So it's been a um uh a focus on that um less than a hundred figures. Anything from you know three to twenty figures is quite common. Fifty figures is getting fairly large for most of the games that are coming out at the moment, and a hundred figures is very large. Whereas something like um Flames of War, you not uh unusual to have 200 figures um and um 20 tanks, or or 20 tanks or a combination thereof. So I think the biggest thing is one variety, huge variety of stuff available, but the move towards skirmish and also to nonlinear turn sequences, which I'm not convinced is the best direction for um good gaming.

SPEAKER_00 12:43

Yeah, I it's funny, we were uh we have a gaming group that meets on Wednesday, and uh we play saga quite a bit and uh bolt action, and to your point about the nonlinear turn sequence, you know, bolt action the the way they do it with the dice in the bag. Um what I found is you either love it or you hate it. There's no in between. It's not like it's okay. It's just you really don't like it because you feel like you don't have control, or you like it because you like that kind of bit of uncertainty about when you're gonna get your turn. So yeah, I I've seen that too with a lot of games.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

Well, my objection is um more game design theory issue, in that um there's a overhead with every turn that your players have to decide what to do. And um when you have something like um activation-based stuff, then you have an awful lot of turns in the game. Um, regardless of how they describe them, you're going to have a turn for every unit. And so instead of saying, say, having um six turns or eight turns, you have 20 or 30 turns, and you have that cognitive um load every time because I was thinking I might do this, but then you went and did this over here. And so now I've got uh when I get my choice to activate, I'm gonna decide, oh, I was thinking of activating that, but now I'm gonna activate my tank, and I'm going to and so I've got to rebuild my um strategy more frequently. Whereas something like flames of war with its um uh more classic I go, you go, you're having your turn, and your movement is first and then shooting. And while you're doing that, I can be building up a picture of okay, how am I going to adjust my strategy? I've got my plan, hopefully I've got a plan. Um, and um what am I going to have to adjust depending on what's happening? And by the time that your turn's over, um, I've had a long enough period and it's predictable enough in a sense that I can have my uh strategy adjusted, and then I can just go and do everything for my turn while you're working on your turn. And so the um, you know, people think about uh ultimate activations and so forth having less downtime and more involvement, whereas I see the downside of them being the opposite. There's more time where people are thinking and not playing. And whereas um in flames of war, when it's my turn, because my turn is going to be relatively short, you are thinking about your reaction to it, and then when we get to the shooting part, you're involved because you are rolling saves and so forth. And also, please, please, miss, and all those other bits. Um, and so I think it actually slows the game and doesn't create as much immersion as a well-designed Igo Yugo turn. Now, going back to the classic Igo Yugo stuff of the um 80s, uh, yeah, there were some horrendous games where they really did not use that mechanism well. But I think the mechanism actually has a lot going for it and can be um a very powerful design mechanism that's often overlooked.

SPEAKER_00 16:13

Yeah. Yeah, and I think that's always a challenge with any game is you know, I think when people want granularity and want it to be more detailed, there's always this challenge of as a game designer, do you want a simulation or a game? Because they are, to me, two different things. And I don't like playing simulations. Like I'm not trying to have it be real world 100%.

SPEAKER_01 16:33

So taking flames of war as an example, my goal in every game design is to tell a story. And the story was you're a company commander. You don't need to know anything below what a company commander knows. So people ask, oh, why can't I pop smoke on my tanks? You're a company commander. That's a tank commander decision, possibly a platoon commander decision. Certainly not a company commander decision. Your tanks down there, that's why they hit on four plus, because they're smart and know when to pop smoke. These guys hit on two plus because they don't even have smoke discharges, and if they did, they wouldn't know what to do with them. So putting the detail level right, getting the story right, and then, as I said, an operations researcher trained in applied mathematics to real situations. Um, and there's a lot of interesting spreadsheets and detail going on behind to get the math right for things like um armor penetration and um taking the real stats of something and converting it into a sensible cross rating. And since unlike a fantasy game where there's only uh a dozen tanks to worry about, and you can just make them up on the spot, um, with a historical game that um I think we had over well over a thousand um by the time that Spreadship died, different models and tanks in it, not all of which we ever produced, um, yeah, coming up with a consistent set of things across a thousand requires more um organized structure than just oh, I think it's better than a sherman, but worse than a tiger. Um and so there's a lot of math goes on behind it, but the model itself that you get to see as a player is fairly straightforward. But the thing that makes me happy about it um is that people who should know what they're talking about, tank commanders, tank company commanders and so forth who've played the game, go, yeah, the details like the of exactly what you're doing sometimes seem a little funny, but at the end of the game, the story of the game is right. Like artillery people get all funny about the the way artillery is handled because it's not at all like artillery is handled in reality, but it produces the right result in the game with no slowing down and no mathematics and and so forth. So I think you can actually produce a better simulation by just finding what are the key elements that you're trying to model here, and then focusing on them and getting rid of all of the other stuff. Adding more um inputs actually tends to make a worse model. So I think the dichotomy between simulation and a good game is a false dichotomy. You can make a better simulation that's also a good game by not turning the the player into a um manual computer.

SPEAKER_00 19:33

Yeah. Well, I I've played a lot of Flames of War. I started playing in first edition. In fact, I ran a tournament this Saturday for our local group here. Um one question I had that that kind of popped in my head as you were talking. So when you went, when you guys had Flames of War and World War II, and I think there's enough information out there, people, there's enough experts and things. And then you go to Team Yankee, and now you have all these individuals that are literally in the tanks or have experience fairly recently. And it's funny, I we I live about 30 miles south of Seattle, and we have a large uh military base, uh joint base, Lewis McCord here, and um we have a lot of active and retired guys that are part of our gaming group, and that is probably and and most of them are are artillery guys, some of them are old school, you know, two guys, and and all the new younger guys are all missile guys, you know, and multiple launch and all that stuff. Um and that's the biggest complaint. They're like, that model would be six blocks back that way. If this was real, you know, that's their their biggest argument is why is it on the table? It shouldn't be on the table. And I would say, well, they're a model company, right? They want to sell models and people want to play with their models, so that's part of the equation.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Yeah. One of the early decisions was um, yeah, people want their models on the table. People, I mean, we could have always said, look, artillery is abstract and you don't get models for it. But it's like, come on, the models that cold, whether it's toad guns or SPs or something, everybody wants to make the models. So if you're making the models, they've got to be on table. So if they've got to be on table, you've got to give up on linear ground scale. Because if your table is big enough that artillery has some meaning, then the ground scale would be ridiculous, and um most battles would be you know on this part of the table, and then the rest of it's empty with artillery and logistics and so forth happening um for the rest of the table. So uh we came up, or I came up with an idea of essentially a logarithmic um scale. And there is actually some math behind the scale, but basically, this is submachine gun range, this is rifle range, and so forth, this is sort of tank combat range for smaller guns. This is tank combat range with larger guns, and this is artillery range. And once again, while completely wrong, it produces a good story and a good feel for it. And yes, um, trying to come up with a an artillery methodology that um accounted for the most significant factors but was still playable was a bit of a challenge, and you've over the years seen the various um variations that we've tried on that. Um and yeah, the the current one is basically if the template's over terrain, then um we assume the terrain has some impact on the difficulty of um locating and ranging in on the target, which is a humongously gross simplification. But if you spend time saying, okay, well, first of all, this observer needs to, or somebody needs to locate the target, and then they communicate to the observer, and then the observer needs to range in and so forth, you're going to spend, I mean, you might have a fun gang for an artillery officer, but um the rest of the world is going to go, yeah, but I just want to shoot tanks. Um so pushing, because it's about the tanks and infantry, pushing the artillery to the side and having a much simplified model um works overall for the majority of the audience. But I do appreciate the artillerymen um having problems with the fundamental simplicity of the model. And yep, it's deliberate that it's oversimplified because artillery is incredibly complicated and incredibly problematic and messy. Um and also remarkably slow. Now, in these computer-operated days, I'm sure it's a lot faster. But by 1944, the standard response time for American artillery in Italy, which was very similar to Europe, if not better than Europe, was 15 minutes. The time between you putting in a request for artillery and getting a response of shells coming incoming was an average of 15 minutes. So it's not a you know highly responsive thing, but fortunately battles aren't fought like they are in World of Tanks. They're incredibly slow as well. A one-on-one tank battle can take three hours because everybody, the same as you know, infantry, like sure, if I stood up, I might be able to see you and shoot you, but I'd die first. Same with tanks. If I come around the corner, I might be able to find you and shoot you, but I'd die first. So, how am I going to see if I can find you and shoot you without you getting me first? And you end up with a much, much slower pace of operations. I mean, even the big tank battles like Prokarovka or um um Goodwill, the average um speed of tanks was a very slow walk, a dawdle. You could have actually walked across the battlefield with your grandchild um faster than the tanks were advancing. Uh even a proper off game, they were the average advance rate was um about three kilometers an hour, which your toddler can almost manage without too much trouble. And so battles were actually really slow. So um, yeah, now I've lost track of where I was going, but artillery is particularly slow. Although, interestingly, at that time, the way um the British um or Commonwealth artillery was operating, they were up to about five minutes as the response time, and that became the APCA, I think, method, which is currently much more related to how all of the NATO and allied um forces work. But um, yeah, it was slow. Air support, you're looking hours, two to three hours. That doesn't work very well in a game. So we just have air support coming in and doing things. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 26:14

Yeah. It for me it's it's fun. It's a fun game. I I love playing it, so I played it and play a lot of Team Yankee too. Um, so when you guys released Team Yankee, knowing that you you had a lot of individuals out there that had personal experiences with a lot of these vehicles and stuff, did you have a lot more stronger opinions about different things uh with that rule set?

SPEAKER_01 26:37

Um the the fundamental decision was that essentially nothing much had changed. I mean, this is we have relatively early guided missiles, but other than that, it's World War II with faster, bigger, stronger tanks. So having made that fundamental decision, um, it was a matter of how do we scale that faster better stronger, and what assumptions do we need to make. And we did have playtesters who were active military and playtesters who had been there, and there's a lot of reports and things. Um and of course, there were a lot of um battles that weren't involving um the big players to look at and see how things were performing. So we were fairly confident that it was a good enough model, um, and that's been largely borne out. The complaints of people are generally um around the periphery, things like artillery. Recently, somebody was um saying that they didn't think our handling of thermal imaging was uh that good. I'd agree, but our goal was to um keep it simple without making it totally dominate. Um, I've got thermal imaging, I want to fight at night and you're dead. No, that's not a fun game. How without changing much can we give people with thermal imaging an advantage without making it um overwhelming?

SPEAKER_00 28:11

Yeah. Well, I think for me, playing both systems, I think you guys achieve what you wanted to, and the fact that if you've played Flames of War and then you played Team Yankee, the lethality is at a much higher level in Team Yankee, which it should be. I mean, we're seeing that proven out with the modern battlefield. If you can see it, it's probably gonna die. I mean, that's just the reality. So yeah, I think you guys did a good job with it. I just back in the day, I was on the uh forums group and I've seen you in the Facebook group, and I just I always laugh when you know you get uh individuals that are super passionate, which is great for the game. Oh yeah, but they always have, yeah, and then you're trying to defend your position. So well, uh enough about uh that. I'd really like to talk to you about your new game, Angels 1.6. Um, I downloaded the rules. I was actually looking through it, and I've been watching it for a while. Yep, excellent. Uh and uh I I think at this point, are you in pre-production or or you I think the the Kickstarter comes out in June, I think is that the goal?

SPEAKER_01 29:14

July. July is the goal at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 29:16

July Okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

Yep.

SPEAKER_00 29:18

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 29:18

So the state of play is that um a lot of board games and so forth, and I had this advice from experienced board game uh Kickstarter people was oh, you don't need to have everything sorted out when you do the Kickstarter. You've got you know a year or two um to deliver the game, and two years is fine. Like, well, no, that's not really how the miniature gaming market works. Um it's not a one-off game like a lot of board games, or with a few little expansions on the side. Um, a well-designed miniatures game has a sequence of more models, more models, more models, because it's miniatures and that's what people are after. So rather than um taking people's money and then going, okay, well, we'll come back to you in a year or so and um yeah, hopefully deliver something. Um, my commitment was to make sure that I had everything ready before I go to Kickstarter, which isn't exactly how Kickstarter was originally intended, but it's very much how it's working these days. So at the moment, today's a weekly paper version of what the box is going to look like. Um, and so we've got uh everything ready just about, apart from a little bit of graphic design, to actually manufacture that box now, and we'll be doing that um over the coming month or two um and sending them out as um review copies and so forth. So when you go to the Kickstarter, it will be ready. The money comes in, we will be starting production. And the main reason for that is we want to be able to get the next one done. Um and so if we're spending a year doing that and then we've got to do the next one, it's just way too slow. So uh once the first one's done, while the production of that one's underway, we'll be getting ready for a second Kickstarter, and then a third one and a fourth one and so forth. So the game isn't just going to be the initial Battle of Britain um Spitfires versus Messages thing. It will expand across um all the different theaters and uh exciting models and so forth.

SPEAKER_00 31:33

Yeah. And the scale is one and one hundredth for the airport.

SPEAKER_01 31:36

One and one forty-fourth.

SPEAKER_00 31:37

One and one forty-fourth, okay.

SPEAKER_01 31:39

Yeah, same scale actually is um uh flanks of warrior craft. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 31:45

Well, I you know, I guess for me personally, just looking at the game, um, reading through the rules, um there's a couple things to me that stick out. One is we were talking before the show, just that I think aircraft games struggle because it it, you know, it's a 3D space that they're fighting in. I think that's hard to um capture in a game in a two-dimensional game in some ways. Um but I think you've done a good job with the one, the dashboard, having the dashboard, that kind of immersive quality of the cockpit, I think is really unique. And uh what you did with the flight stands, and I've seen that before, but I think it is a big is a big deal for the game to me.

SPEAKER_01 32:26

Yeah. Yeah, so little radio aerials with the the models on top. And I didn't think to get myself properly organized, so I haven't got me immediately to hand to um show you. But yeah, one of the um primary goals was to make the game immersive and um yeah, uh sp um airspace is a three-dimensional thing, so the aircraft had to move in three dimensions. I mean, I designed games I want to play, and ever since I was a kid, that was my dream. And um, so yeah, having it available now is just awesome. The other um part of it was to design something that physics worked in. Now, no commercially available aerial or space dogfighting game at the moment has any real anything more than a nod to physics. Whereas I wanted the um your miniature plane to fly like it should. So if you pull up hard and do a turn, well, your energy is going to be low, you're going to be sitting at very low speed, and next turn you're going to be constrained by that. You've only got so much power in your engine unless you then dive back down again, you're you're stuck with that. If you've been pulling lots of hard turns, then you're just getting whatever power your engine can give you each turn and just holding on the stick and hoping that it'll be enough, and or your buddy will come and um get this guy off your tail um and um give you time to recover a bit of energy before you get back into the fight again. So like flames of war though, I didn't want that to be a mathematically complicated thing. Back when I was um working in math long ago, I did do a more um simulationist approach of doing the math for it. And um, it was okay, but it was not as crunchy as many things, but still too crunchy for my taste. So when we came to um working on Angels 1.6, the goal was to somehow create a um a flight model that didn't require you to do mathematics but still worked. And also didn't require um a lot of the older games had big protractors so that you turn and move in a circle, and that's um cumbersome. Uh things like uh Wings of Glory and X-Wing get around that with their little um movement um things, but they also have their issues and are rather restrictive. And um to my happiness, when I've demonstrated Angels 1.6 to um public groups that know nothing about um some of the time you're not even board gamers, I've had people who have never really thought about aerial gaming, never played a miniatures war game before, and certainly not thought about um flying an aircraft in combat, invent um quite complex but normal um combat maneuvers like um scissors and yo-yos and so forth. Because the physics works, the player goes, Oh, what am I gonna do now? And they start doing these um combat maneuvers because they're the sensible thing to do. And uh that to me is a great plus in a game where people can, without having too much background knowledge or anything, can start experimenting with and playing with things that are actually quite sophisticated concepts, but without having to know about that sort of thing.

SPEAKER_00 36:11

Um I think there's uh some interesting stuff that uh I I like the idea of what you did with the fright, with the you know, reducing actions and and you know, it is it does it puts that part of the the human aspect of the game and the pilot into it, but again, without not making it so hard to figure out, it's very straightforward. If you get hit, you accumulate fright and it reduces your actions, and that makes it harder for you to do things. So yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:44

Unless you're feeling great for your dice are rolling well, depending on your viewpoint of the um story business mechanical side.

SPEAKER_00 36:52

Yeah.

unknown 36:53

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:53

And I think the other thing that people forget, especially, well, I I think with all air burial, but specifically in World War II, these were very short um, you know, just in you know, engagement because you were limited by the amount of fuel that you had and the amount of ammo you were carrying. And so this idea of you know these planes being in the air and fighting for, you know, more than twenty to thirty minutes is probably not very accurate.

SPEAKER_01 37:23

Yeah, even ten minutes was a long engagement because yeah, that's a long time. And everybody ends up, I mean, in any combat, uh you've got the the guys who are brave and gung-ho, and the guys who are more along for the right, even amongst fighter pilots, there's this levels of um willingness to put themselves at risk and level of experience. And um yeah, the the fight soon breaks up into um a relatively unstructured um thing. And um yeah, the the few that are keen have burned out their ammunition and running low on fuel, and the rest of them are going, well, either I've lost the fight or I'm following my leader, and yeah, everybody heads home.

SPEAKER_00 38:12

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, and especially you know during the Battle of Britain, because you know, you have you know British aircraft flying out towards the coast and the Channel to meet, you know, uh German aircraft, and they've already, you know, flew in at very distance, so by the time they kind of get in the middle, there's not a lot of fuel left, and someone's got to give up and turn around and bug out at some point.

SPEAKER_01 38:34

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And yeah, even the longest um well, having 30 seconds of ammunition is extraordinary. Having 10 seconds of ammunition is fairly good. Having six seconds of ammunition is not so good. Um so yeah, there isn't a lot of holding down the trigger and pounding um you know away. Mostly it's you know, you fire your three-second burst and you've only got three or four of them, maybe five. Um, and then it's all over. You're out of ammo.

unknown 39:11

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 39:12

So um for the expansions, are you looking to expand just into more aircraft or do specific um historical battles?

SPEAKER_01 39:21

So um assuming that Battle of Britain, the first release um is successful, then the plan at the moment is to go to Midway for the second one. Okay. Um very different sort of campaign and introduces American and um Japanese in the Pacific and so forth. Um the aircraft uh again, and the match of the aircraft and the way the game will play is very different from the Battle of Britain. In the Battle of Britain, you've got your spitfires and measuresmiths, which are remarkably comparable aircraft. Everybody debates as to which was better and which had more performance in this way and so forth. But they're very, very matched aircraft. And then you've got your Hurricanes and your twin-engined um measures 110s and so forth. In the Pacific, you've got complete mismatches. You've got the uh Mishubishi Zero, which is an incredibly maneuverable aircraft with a um stunning rate of climb and fairly heavy armament, um, but built to travel incredible distances um on a really small engine and so forth, so it's structurally right at the limit and so quite delicate. On the other hand, you've got um Grumman, who is known as the Ironworks, of um their wildcat, which is as rugged as it gets. It is solid, tough, 650 cal, but its climb rate is okay. It's um can dive much better than a zero. Its turn is yeah, it's a big lump of metal in the sky. It's got a biggest engine, but it's still just a big lump of metal. So you've got the balance between the Japanese um dancing all over the place and trying to avoid getting shot while getting a good solid um pattern on the Wildcats. And the Wildcats basically trying to use teen tactics to stay alive while waiting for a um zero to make a mistake so they can turn on and um tear it up. And so it'd be a very, very different game, but exactly the same mechanics.

SPEAKER_00 41:37

Are we gonna get Brewster Buffaloes?

SPEAKER_01 41:41

The um the basic plan for every box is four fighters um and some bombers, or every uh release. And so at the moment it's the um Zero and the Um Nikojima Kai 43 um codename Oscar or Falcon for the Japanese. Um and the Wildcat F4 F4 Wildcat and the either the P400 Air Cobra or the P-40 um Warhawk. The Warhawk has the advantage of being more well known, but it really didn't arrive in any significant um numbers in 1942. It wasn't until 1943 that the Warhawk really gets going, which puts the air cobra, um, even though it's a more unique aircraft, uh, more into the picture. So that's that. But more aircraft, well, if we make a sufficient amount of money in the first kickstarter, then yes, we will add more aircraft and so forth. I mean, personally, I'd love to have a defiant. Um, I'd love to do French stuff, I'd love to um do the Italians in the Battle of Britain. But um it's all upfront costs and uh market size and so forth. So if you want to see all those things, back the Kickstarter, make sure there's enough um money and obvious market demand, and we'll um work on them all. But for the moment, we're just trying to make um durable cuts, things that we can do, we can get out to the market and we can sell and build up sort of from there so that um perhaps in the future we can bring out some of the stuff uh that we can't necessarily at the moment.

SPEAKER_00 43:36

Yeah. I was just joking about the Brewster. I just think it's one of those aircraft, especially in the Pacific Theater, that's forgotten. There were, I mean, there's so many the Netherlands now.

SPEAKER_01 43:46

The Brewster is definitely number, well, well, probably number four, after the Wildcat, the P forty, and the Air Cobra, the Brewster would be next on the list because not only is it operating in Midway, but it's also operating in um around Malaysia, Singapore, Java, and so forth. And yeah, it's it's um one chance to shine, which it doesn't quite do as well as it could. But performance-wise, it's not much different from the Wildcat. Um it was built to the same specs, and um like the Wildcat, it um kept getting weight added for things like oh, the people have invented this thing called uh self-sealing fuel tanks and pilot armor and um more heavy advanced gun sites and all this stuff, and the performance just starts sort of survivability and effectiveness goes up, and you know, but the performance goes down. So, yeah, the buffalo, fun little aircraft, definitely on my list.

SPEAKER_00 44:52

Yeah. Yeah, I was reading something about um just kind of the during in the early part of the war with the Wildcats, and to your point, kind of the the gang tactics they had to try to use because they knew they couldn't outturn a zero, and so you know, they would always try to have a winged man behind them uh to protect them. Um and I think I I read somewhere where the the the goal, once they figured it out, was to try to hit the zero behind the cockpit because that's where the fuel tank was, and that was kind of the sweet spot as you would try to aim for that, and that's where you were trying to get it.

SPEAKER_01 45:25

One of the interesting things is people come up with a more these highly detailed um solutions. I was um reading recently about a P40 um squadron and 43 on Guadalcanal, and they were coming home complaining that they just weren't able to bring zeros down. And so one of the um fizzers sort of started looking at the problem and they had their guns harmonized at 400 meters, and he talked to the pilots and they're saying, Oh, mostly we're firing at 50 to 75 meters, maybe out to 100 meters. And he got his protractor out and did some maths and stuff and was like, so essentially, rather than all the bullets coming into a cone, into a point, they're just spraying bullets wildly. So even if they get them in the sights, only one or two machine guns are going to be pointing at the target. And so he um worked out how they should be harmonized at 100 meters and did so, and actually got in huge trouble for it. But the pilot who harmonized them at the 100 meters for shot down two aircraft the next day and an aircraft the day after. And so the uh FITA was like, uh everybody else was like, do it to mine, do it to mine, do it to mine. And meanwhile, the Fitter at the same time was in trouble for unauthorized alterations. And uh then it got back to Washington, and Washington said, Thou shalt not do this. You must return them to the standard they're supposed to be. But meanwhile, other squadrons have started doing it, and everybody was no, and they sent an inspector out, and the inspector basically put the guy on a charge, literally on a charge for vandalism, essentially, um, and um started demanding that everybody change it back until basically the um group captain and all the squadron commanders told him to be um go away. And um he stopped and actually started paying attention and then went back to Washington and said, uh, guys, maybe we should listen to these guys. And it wasn't until months later that the guy was actually exonerated for his um vandalism of government property. Um but he never got much credit for um actually making the war hawks much more effective. So the idea of, oh, we're going to aim here, we're going to aim here, very few pilots had the capability, and most aircraft didn't much have the capability either. It was more a matter of, and you can see it in gun camera footage. Hey, he's pretty much in front of me. I'll see if I can get the um bullets to swing past him. And you do see a few of them going, okay, and hitting what they want. But the vast majority of it is very much a um get them close enough and hold the trigger down and hope that you can get the bullets to walk past the plane. So yeah, the idea of um aiming for this part or aiming for that part, yes. A few aces like Maasai and so forth were able to do that with the planes that they had. The majority it's just a matter of in that split second um firing what they could. One of the interesting ones was um guys in the UK who do archaeology, archaeology type stuff, and um they were looking through some gun camera footage from Spitfires for something, and they were like, hang on a moment, that's a Spitfire. And a few minutes later, the next piece of gun camera footage from the same aircraft was another Spitfire, and then onto a Meshosmith. And they were like, that's interesting. I wonder, and one of the spits looked like it had taken some damage. They were like, I wonder if we can find out what's going on here. And so they dug into it and found out that it was a Polish squadron that was most likely in the right place and started reading their records. And one of the Polish um pilots had um come under fire. He didn't know who it was. None of this, the pilot who was flying the plane that shot at the two Spitfires didn't report it. It was just conveniently not in his um intelligence report. But um the Polish pilot um got suddenly somebody behind him shot him, and his plane started sending out a plume of white smoke behind him, and he was like, uh-oh, that's coolant, dies away, and thinking, okay, let's see if I can get back to the airfield before the engine sees it. And then about 10,000 feet, the plume disappears, and he thinks, it's the coolant gone. We're about to seize up, and the engine keeps running and keeps running, and he lands and taxes over to the thing, and the engine's running sweetly and turns it off. It turns out the fitter finds that there's some bullet holes, jagged bullet holes through his wing where the uh other spit had hit him. And the hypothesis that came up with the best they could think was that that was actually causing a contrail behind him. So what he thought is his coolant was just um air condensing around these sharp fragments sticking out of his wing. Um, so yeah, he got shot down by a spit by he thought he'd been shot down, but it was just uh minor damage. So yeah. But yeah, yeah. Picking a target, you've got to be really good. There's only a handful of people whose memoirs talk about that.

SPEAKER_00 50:50

Yeah. Yeah, I always wonder how many individuals that got shot down were shot down because the pilot was skilled enough to hit them, or they just flew into bullets to your point because they're just flying all over the place.

SPEAKER_01 51:02

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 51:03

A lot of both.

SPEAKER_00 51:06

So I had a question. Uh the the quick start, the Kickstarter's gonna come out in July, but you have a special offer on your website for I think 12 individuals.

SPEAKER_01 51:17

Yes. Um yep. Still with some spaces available. The Wing Commanders Club. Yes, thank you for reminding me to talk about that. So the Wing Commanders Club gets you basically one of everything that Savage Mouse Games does forever for free for one upfront cost. So everything we ever make, Age was one six, midway, whatever else we do, Stalingrad, whatever, Korea, you'll get it, plus the Napoleonic game that I was talking about when and if it occurs. I'm working on a World War II skirmish game, all of these things you get, all of them for free. But you also uh have to pay your membership fee, which is an upfront cost of$5,000 New Zealand dollars. Now, for an American, I think the rate at the moment is um 0.6 or maybe 0.5 something.

SPEAKER_00 52:13

So you can about$2,500, I think. Sorry? I think it's about$2,500.

SPEAKER_01 52:20

Yeah, at the moment it probably is. The exchange rate's um not in our favor, but somewhere between$2,500 and$3,000. So if you're a Flames of War fan and you add up how much you've spent on Flames of War, this is probably a very good um deal.

SPEAKER_00 52:34

It is a very good deal, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 52:35

Yeah. The reason for it is that, as I said, I'm trying to get all the production stuff sorted out beforehand. Um, unfortunately, my savings are sort of getting rather thin at the moment. Um, and I'd rather manage to get it all sorted out before the Kickstarter than um have to delay the delivery after the Kickstarter. So if um people join the Wing Commanders Club, that will help get Savage Mouse games up and going and um get this Kickstarter uh to be the wild success that I think it should be. Um so yeah, go to um Angels16, so Angels O-N-E-S-I-X or Angelsdigit16.com. And um if you go to the blog post, the dispatch is there, uh dispatch 10 talks about it, and I'm about to put out some more information on it again. Uh yeah, there are still some positions left. If you're into um uh miniatures gaming, this is a great opportunity to get in at the ground level.

SPEAKER_00 53:40

Yeah, absolutely. And I'll put uh uh links in the show notes to uh the website and everything too. So and uh looking forward to the Kickstarter when it comes out, and I'll make sure that we uh post that on the Facebook group too and do as much as we can to help you out because I'm a huge fan. So it looks like an exciting game. I'll definitely be supporting it. Cool. Well, I think we're kind of at the at the point. I I really appreciate your time. Is there anything else for our listeners that you'd like to share?

SPEAKER_01 54:10

No, no, just yep, go to the website, join the Facebook group. Um there's um the rule book is on the website um and some print and play components so you can try the game out um now while you're waiting for the actual thing to arrive, along with lots of photographs of um the actual models and so forth. Um by the end of the week I hope to have a how to play video um up as well. So, yeah, go visit the website, go sign up to the newsletter there, and you'll get all the information. And um yeah, join up in um July and get your models as soon as I can get them to you.

SPEAKER_00 54:54

Yeah, it's exciting. We're looking forward to it. So cool. All right. Well, with that, uh again, thank you, Phil. I appreciate it, and uh I appreciate appreciate everybody listening today.

SPEAKER_01 55:05

I do too.

SPEAKER_00 55:16

Thank you for listening to the Tanks and Tomahawks podcast. If you'd like to reach out to us, you can find us at tanks.tomahawks at gmail.com or join us over on Facebook at the Tanks and Tomahawks Facebook Group.