- Welcome to Calamity Refuge.
Osmium Density
Recent posts
#21
General Discussion / Re: The Welcoming Committee
Last post by Eveline Gwen T. Allison Fate Hepburn (Valentine Z) - December 13, 2024, 02:20:20 AMAhhh, hello and good day! Apologies in advance if this place has been not used for long, just created an account.
Typically known as Valentine Z on NS circles, along with names such as Clarissa, Samantha, and now Eveline in many other non-NS places.
While my pronouns do go by he/him, I'm practically okay with everything and truth be told, I often get mistaken for a woman. Completely and genuinely fine by me.
For clarity sake, it's not some malicious catfishing attempt or whatever. Ever since I got onto NationStates in Nov 2015, I gave off feminine vibes and I often got mistook. Again, all good. The feminine names represent me better a little bit more, I feel.
Rambling aside, I also love to do photography (I might search around for a thread here, might ask in Discord), along with writing and then running/jogging/hiking on a not too regular basis.
From Burma, but now living in Singapore. In fact, have been living in SG far longer now.
Typically known as Valentine Z on NS circles, along with names such as Clarissa, Samantha, and now Eveline in many other non-NS places.
While my pronouns do go by he/him, I'm practically okay with everything and truth be told, I often get mistaken for a woman. Completely and genuinely fine by me.
For clarity sake, it's not some malicious catfishing attempt or whatever. Ever since I got onto NationStates in Nov 2015, I gave off feminine vibes and I often got mistook. Again, all good. The feminine names represent me better a little bit more, I feel.Rambling aside, I also love to do photography (I might search around for a thread here, might ask in Discord), along with writing and then running/jogging/hiking on a not too regular basis.
From Burma, but now living in Singapore. In fact, have been living in SG far longer now.
#22
The Admin Tower / The Liberalisation of Email
Last post by Luca - December 11, 2024, 01:30:46 AM
Greetings sweet people reading this message, as well as AI page scrapers I haven't banned yet. Time for an "exciting" policy update.
What Happened?
I received a bug report last month in another forum I run saying that someone couldn't make an account because their confirmation email never arrived. If I worked in IT, I would have select the "Have you checked your junk mail" option from the club penguin chat wheel and called it a day. Thankfully my experience is in housekeeping, so I know this is never the problem. Or more specifically, since our email provider (Gandi) shut down my emails twice before, arbitrarily, Arabic proverbs told me it was bound to happen again.
Turns out that Gandi changed their policy so that you could not send emails from domains you were not signing in with. In my case I was, so I felt like this error was a red herring -- hiding the real problem of sending emails through an alias. My best guess is that email usage increased dramatically during COVID and after a few years of heightened traffic, Gandi saw an opportunity to increase their pricing on everything by at least three hundred per cent. Aliases were likely a workaround, so we got hit despite our setup predating the change.
I created a support ticket which I decided not to wait for to act on because, spoilers, it took them thirty days to respond anyway. Reviewing the proposed prices for the coming year, I elected not to drop two hundred fifty dollars on the same service which previously asked twenty eight. Therefore we have migrated providers and I'm pleased to say things are now much better. I put in a refund request for my remaining time with Gandi and look forward to being told "no" thirty days from now.
Do We Have Freaky New Powers?
Sure do.
Since I'm no longer paying sixty of Donald Trump's dollars for each individual email address, I am pleased to say that I can now realistically expand them beyond our traditional "staff only" limit. Therefore, if you have been lamenting that gmail has a growing monopoly on emails, while allowing you no privacy whatsoever, wishing that you could return to a simpler age when smaller sites had their own, that time has arrived.
You can now request an email address @calref.ca if you:
- Have been a Refuge member for more than six months (Discord time is fine)
- Have been reasonably active over that time, and
- Have a forum account
With it, you can log in through the email portal at mail.calref.ca (linked on CalRef.ca), and/or connect your favourite email client, like Thunderbird or Bluemail with the following specifications:
| Service | Server | Port | Security | Authentication |
| IMAP | imap.migadu.com | 993 | TLS | Plain password |
| POP | pop.migadu.com | 995 | TLS | Plain password |
| SMTP | smtp.migadu.com | 465 | TLS | Plain password |
What's Your Level of Oversight? What are the quirks?
A good question and best to know beforehand. I can reset your password if you are locked out. I cannot read your emails. I can see how much space you're using. I can also provide extra help if you are ever being harassed to an extent that your junk mail filter insufficient or will not help. There are no hard storage limits, since we have a collective storage cap that I feel like we're unlikely to hit, but if you're using like ten gigabytes of space, I will probably ask that you trim down a bit, which I cannot do on your behalf.
If you want to save all your old emails, simply put them in a folder. Don't use your trash as a folder because the junk mail and trash are automatically pruned after 30 and 60 days, respectively. Any password change you do or major change that I do will take six minutes to take effect. So if you change your password and immediately try to log in, it will probably not work before that propagation time.
If these things sound agreeable, shoot me a message either here on the forums or on Discord and I will set you up with an account. In the future, I'd like to have an automated system to do this, but for now I'll be doing it by hand.
#23
Refugia / Re: [draft] Bureaucracy Waits ...
Last post by Aav - December 06, 2024, 01:57:55 AMThis is at vote: https://www.nationstates.net/page=rmb/postid=57811468
#24
Refugia / Re: [draft] The Culture of the...
Last post by Aav - December 06, 2024, 01:57:40 AMThis is at vote: https://www.nationstates.net/page=rmb/postid=57811453
#25
Refugia / Re: The Refugia Revised Statut...
Last post by Aav - December 06, 2024, 01:52:26 AM- This document establishes this association of nations and their shared beliefs and values. We define these values as refuge and shelter to all who have need of it, environmental stewardship of our nations while working to improve environmental sustainability, as well as the fair treatment and political inclusion of all peoples. We resolve ourselves to form governments with transparency and integrity in leadership and work to leave things as better than we found them.
The nations here will compose a region to be known as Refugia.
These Statutes form our law.
These Statutes form our law.
- The Refugia Revised Statutes -
Residency:
1. A nation which resides within the Region is defined as a "Resident" and maintains this status for the duration of its residency.
- A Resident which is the proxy of another nation, and primarily exists within Refugia to accrue influence without community presence, is defined as a "Sleeper".
2. Resident may only be ejected or barred from the region in one of the following circumstances:
- Unruly conduct, where the offending Resident has not been receptive to intervention.
- Impending threat, where the Office of Operations determines the Resident poses a risk to the stability of Refugia or the security of its inhabitants.
- Unregistered Sleeper, where the primary operator of a Sleeper has not declared the aims and ownership of that nation to the Office of Operations and Arch-Administrator.
- The Resident expresses, aligns with, or otherwise represents fascism, hate speech, or intolerance.
3. The reasoning for all ejections of Residents must be publicly reported by the responsible party, and the ejected nation may appeal the ejection by soliciting a review to the Regional Council.
- An appeal vote must be concluded within seven days or with all Councillors having voted.
- An appeal vote is considered approved if it has less than two Against votes.
- The banning of Non-Resident nations shall not require public reporting.
Member States:
4. Member States are defined as Residents with both a residency of no less than seven days and a continuous World Assembly membership over the same period.
- A Resident will lose its status as a Member State if it elects to depart the Region, its status is self-requested to be revoked, or the Resident is ejected.
- Residents that lose their status may apply to reobtain it unless they are barred from the Region. It shall be reinstated if the Resident meets the criteria in RRS 4.
5. Residents may apply for Member State status in conditions where admission to the World Assembly is declined, rejected, or impossible.
- Residents applying for a World Assembly Exemption must have resided within the Region for a period of time not less than fourteen days and receive the unanimous approval from the Regional Council to provide the exemption.
- In the event that an exempted Member State accrues influence in another region, requests their status be revoked, or is ejected from the region, the Member State's exemption status is revoked. The Member State can apply to have this status reinstated, following the same protocol as laid out in RRS 5(a).
6. Member States are entitled to submit any proposal, amendment, repeal, or revision to any revised statute, including this document in its entirety. Votes must be easily accessible and include the option to abstain. Only one vote is allotted to each Member State per referendum.
- Proposals must be supported by at least one other Member State, which may be referred to as a "second."
- Votes will last a period of seven days from the time of announcement and will be enacted or discarded upon conclusion.
- Proposals which have been defeated will trigger a cooldown period on the sponsor Member State from submitting a new proposal for seven days after the end of the poll defeat.
Government Roles and Responsibilities:
7. The Regional Council is defined as the co-equal heads of government in Refugia. It is comprised of the following:
- The Arch-Administrator, defined as Refuge Isle, which acts as the head of state for the Region for any legal or foreign circumstance which requires such. This Councillor shall:
- Appoint and dismiss Councillors into positions as the result of elections to their respective office.
- Maintain records of significance to the Region and its history.
- Verify voter integrity by maintaining a roster of valid Member States.
- Cast votes corresponding to the will of the Region's voting Member States during the circumstance of also being the Region's World Assembly Delegate.
- The Councillor of Foreign Affairs, whose responsibilities are defined as management and maintenance of the travel portals within the Region. The Councillor of Foreign Affairs seeks out ideologically-similar regions to Refugia and builds relationships with them. To that end, the Councillor oversees the construction, maintenance, and withdrawal of embassies. This Councillor shall:
- Maintain the relationships between Refugia and its allies.
- Appoint and dismiss Envoys, as the Councillor feels necessary, to aid in their duties.
- Publish a dispatch to the Region which provides an informed opinion for the reason an embassy should be opened or closed.
- Initiate a four-day referendum among Member States, to determine if an embassy may be opened or closed. Such openings and closures may not occur without a referendum, and may not be acted upon contrary to the referendum.
- The Councillor of Culture, whose responsibilities are defined as orchestrating cultural events and developing the identity of the Refugi culture. This Councillor shall:
- Develop a Regional Eco Report to fulfill goals stipulated by RRS 14(a) and RRS 14(b) by identifying ways in which Member States of the Region may contributed towards the environmental targets established therein.
- Publish regular updates to the Regional Eco Report to maintain its relevance and timely advice.
- When additional assistance is necessary to fulfill the duties of office, appoint an assistant.
- The Councillor of Operations, whose responsibilities are defined as directing the Office of Operations, identifying, resolving, or guarding against internal and external threats. This Councillor shall:
- Identify and respond as necessary to threats or crises which target or impact the Region.
- Eject or bar Residents as necessary via Refugia's Border Control in an applicable circumstance of any subsection of RRS 2.
- Develop Refugia's intelligence apparatus to the extent necessary to carry out the subsections of this statute.
- Maintain a registry of Sleeper Residents and their respective controllers.
- Appoint and dismiss "Wards", acting as staff for the Office of Operations, to carry out subsections of this statute as directed by the Office's Councillor.
- The Councillor of World Assembly Affairs, whose responsibilities are defined as facilitating discussions on World Assembly resolutions-at-vote, developing dispatches with Information For Voters (IFV) on current resolutions at vote, and providing regional recommendations for votes to the World Assembly Delegate. This Councillor shall:
- Read and consider proposals in both the General Assembly and Security Council.
- Initiate discussions in the Regional Message Board on upcoming proposals, and explain their impressions based on a reading of the draft and records of international debate.
- Develop and publish regional dispatches which provide information for voters about the current resolutions at vote in the World Assembly.
- If needed, oversee appointment of a second to assist in any of the aforementioned responsibilities.
8. The World Assembly Delegate is the Region's envoy to the World Assembly. The Region shall support the Delegate's endorsement, and the Delegate shall apply that support towards World Assembly approval and voting stances that it believes represent the Region's values.
- The Delegate shall make a public statement to the Region if they choose to not vote in alignment with the Regional majority regarding a World Assembly vote.
- The Delegate nation is designated and dismissed by the Arch-Administrator, and no nations other than the designated nation is considered the rightful Delegate.
- A Delegate who loses Member State status or World Assembly membership resigns their tenure, and the nation which possesses the highest level of World Assembly endorsements may serve as Delegate in the interim until a new Delegate is designated.
Government Accountability:
9. All Residents within the Region have the right to solicit an official Regional ruling, opinion, or position from the Regional Council, and delivered by a representative thereof, on subjects of:
- A Foreign Affairs policy, position, or perspective.
- The status of a Member State.
- Challenges regarding any ejection or barring of nations from the Region, where a majority of the Regional Council may reverse the action.
- Challenges regarding the legality of activity by a Councillor or their staff, where a majority of the Regional Council may reverse the action.
10. At any time, a Member State can charge a Regional Councillor or Delegate of neglect in their duties or mismanagement of their position. Their charge will be submitted in writing to the Arch-Administrator only after a second member state has seconded the motion.
- The charge must contain a list of grievances against the accused and arguments as to why these grievances should result in the removal of the accused prior to the next election.
- If RRS 10(a) is met, the Arch-Administrator will call for a vote of No Confidence among the Member States, lasting five days, and decided by a simple majority.
- If the No Confidence vote passes, the target Councillor is removed from office, a new election will immediately be called for that Councillor seat.
[/list]
11. In the event that a Councillor or a Councillor's staff operates in contradiction to the RRS, the Arch-Administrator may suspend the powers of that Councillor or staff member until such time as it may be reviewed under a RRS 9 ruling, which is automatically invoked upon suspension.
Elections:
12. The Arch-Administrator will call elections for all democratic Council seats according to the following convention:
| Candidacy Period | Feb 12 - 19 | May 12 - 19 | Aug 12 - 19 | Nov 12 - 19 |
| Voting Period | Feb 20 - 26 | May 20 - 26 | Aug 20 - 26 | Nov 20 - 26 |
| Transition Period | Feb 27 - 28 | May 27 - 28 | Aug 27 - 28 | Nov 27 - 28 |
- During the Candidacy Period, any Member State may declare their intention to stand for office.
- During the Voting Period, all Member States may vote in all elections via ranked preference instant-runoff; candidates are eliminated by fewest votes in each round of ballot counting.
- During the Transition Period, elected councillors will receive overlapping access and powers with their predecessors, and all predecessors are dismissed at the end of the Period.
13. The following rules govern election procedure:
- Candidacy declarations must be posted to the Regional Message Board.
- Candidacies composed of multiple Member States are invalid, and candidacies where a Resident has lost Member State status during the election cycle become invalid.
- Member States are prohibited from occupying more than one Council seat at a time or occupying the same Council seat more than two times consecutively.
- In the case that a Member State has won multiple Council seats, they must select their Council seat of preference within 24 hours of the Voting Period's conclusion, otherwise the selection will be carried out by the Arch-Administrator.
- If a position is unable to be filled or becomes vacant by resignation, absence from existence, or legal impossibility, the Arch-Administrator may act in that position's capacity or appoint an individual who will serve in that capacity for the remainder of the term.
Goals and Ideals:
14. The Region defines the goals for both its Members and the Region collectively in the following ways:
- Reach an average Environmental Beauty score of 1,300 on or before December 31, 2024, and maintained thereafter.
- Reach an average Eco-Friendliness score of 3,750 on or before December 31, 2024, and maintained thereafter.
15. The Region defines its military alignment as "Neutral", shunning the agendas and obligations of the world's self-interested regimes, and only acting in the direct defence of the Region's allies when determined to be necessary by the Councillor of Operations.
16. The Region observes January 31st, the anniversary of the founding of the Region, as a region-wide holiday.
Last updated 9 Mar 2024
#26
Refugia / [at vote] The Culture of the R...
Last post by Luca - December 03, 2024, 08:48:25 PMThe Culture of the Romans I: Corinthians
PREAMBLE. The Culture of the Romans is a reform arc based on the idea that the RSS has become swole and should be smaller so that it doesn't scare the children, however it must become smaller in a way that does not allow it to become worse. In reality, the Culture of the Romans was about conquest and pillaging things to prop up their economy that was, itself, not self-sufficient, but that's not as fun to theme your legal reform on;
The Region regards the legal section on Member States to be overly verbose,
Consequently revises RRS 4 through RRS 6 in their entirety to the following content:
Member States:
RRS 4. Member States are defined as Residents with both a residency of no less than seven days and a continuous World Assembly membership over the same period.
- A Member State can only lose its status if it is no longer a Resident or no longer a World Assembly member.
RRS 5. Residents may apply for Member State status in cases where World Assembly is impossible if they have resided within the Region of no less than fourteen days and receive the unanimous approval from the Regional Council.
- An exempted Member State can only lose Member State status if it accrues influence in another region or requests its status to be terminated.
RRS 6. Member States are entitled to submit revisions to the Refugia Revised Statutes, including this document in its entirety by Regional referendum, with all Member States entitled to a vote.
- Proposals must be supported by at least one other Member State, called a Second.
- Referendums must be accessible to all Member States, last seven days, include the option to abstain, and be correspondingly enacted or discarded on conclusion.
- An author whose proposal has been defeated suffers a seven day cooldown on another referendum submission.
Authored by: Refuge Isle
Seconded by:
#27
Refugia / Re: [draft] Bureaucracy Waits ...
Last post by Natalie - December 03, 2024, 07:41:54 PMThe Junitaki delegation arrives on the back of a large, shaggy dog. It pants as it lumbers into the meeting room, a saturated tongue lolling out of its mouth and leaving a visible trail of drool. The representative dismounts and hurries over to the table.
"I'm so sorry, I'm not late, am I?" They glance around the room taking stock of all one (1) persons present. "...Okay, I am late. I'm terribly sorry, this isn't like me at all, but you would not believe the traffic on the Skyrail today- anyway, I'm not here to bore you with excuses. Let's get brown to brash tax."
They gently slide the proposed text out from under the arm of the sleeping admin and give it a look. Regional Council... Million Dreams... tax haven... everything seemed to check out. They quietly scribbled their name under the Second: field, pushed it back across the polished oaken surface, and retreated to their mount.
"I'm so sorry, I'm not late, am I?" They glance around the room taking stock of all one (1) persons present. "...Okay, I am late. I'm terribly sorry, this isn't like me at all, but you would not believe the traffic on the Skyrail today- anyway, I'm not here to bore you with excuses. Let's get brown to brash tax."
They gently slide the proposed text out from under the arm of the sleeping admin and give it a look. Regional Council... Million Dreams... tax haven... everything seemed to check out. They quietly scribbled their name under the Second: field, pushed it back across the polished oaken surface, and retreated to their mount.
#28
Refugia / [at vote] Bureaucracy Waits Fo...
Last post by Aav - November 24, 2024, 06:21:30 PMHello Refugia! Something I have come to realize is that confusingly, while I occupy the Refugia Arch-Administrator position, the Refugia Revised Statutes actually says that Luca is the Arch-Administrator because this is written into text.
We should fix that. I therefore propose the following amendment to the Refugia Revised Statutes:
We should fix that. I therefore propose the following amendment to the Refugia Revised Statutes:
Quote7. The Regional Council is defined as the co-equal heads of government in Refugia. It is comprised of the following:
The Arch-Administrator, defined asRefuge IsleA Million Dreams, which acts as the head of state for the Region for any legal or foreign circumstance which requires such. This Councillor shall:
#29
General Discussion / Review: Peglin
Last post by Natalie - October 28, 2024, 06:03:32 PMOne of the great joys of media is that through its abundance and the accessibility of creation, the most unlikely combinations of ideas can exist for the most unlikely subsections of an audience to enjoy. In gaming, years of innovation and trends falling in and out of favour have led indie developers to some unexpectedly intuitive crossroads, from casino games-meet-roguelikes to card games-meet-roguelikes to... maybe we're a little too fixated on Rogue these days.
Peglin is one such example: Peggle, but it's a roguelike. For the uninitiated, Peggle is like pachinko or Plinko or what have you, where you launch balls down into a board full of pegs, and your goal is to hit and eliminate them. It's earned a surprising level of respect and nostalgia in recent years and there isn't much like it on the market today. Roundguard attempted the same roguelike twist a few years ago and failed to fully capitalize on the concept, but Peglin recently came out of a years-long Early Access development to try and scratch the itch. This review was written based on the 1.0 Steam version on PC.
In terms of roguelikes, Peglin feels closest to Slay the Spire, containing a similar branching map system and elements of deckbuilding. The basic premise of a Peglin run is this: you select a character (each of which has different starting properties), select a starting relic (relics provide passive always-on abilities and perks), and start clearing rooms. After each encounter, you have a chance to buy some items or health, then shoot your ball through the remaining board to travel either left or right down the fork in the map to continue to the next room. At the bottom of the map is a boss; beat it and you go to the next world, beat all three worlds and your run is successful, and then you can go again on a higher difficulty.
Now, combat is pretty simple. You have an inventory of orbs - balls - which effectively constitute your deck. These orbs will have different properties and damage values, and at the start of each battle this deck of orbs will be randomized and presented to you in a linear order. Each turn, you shoot one of your orbs through a field of pegs. For each peg hit, the orb scores damage according to its stats, and if you hit the crit peg that damage is stepped up to the orb's crit value. At the top of your screen is a line of enemies advancing from right to left towards you. The sum of your shot is then dealt to whichever enemy you're targeting (or the closest one within line of sight to your target), and then the enemies will all move towards and/or attack you. Then it's your turn again, you use the next orb in your deck, rinse and repeat until you win or lose. You'll get gold from certain pegs and from killing enemies, and you can use that gold after each battle to restore HP and buy or upgrade orbs; the curation of the orbs in your inventory is where the game's deckbuilding components really come into play.
A typical encounter from early in a run.
With the basics laid out, we can talk about what goes wrong. First, you need to understand that there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to roguelike difficulty. The first entails making the game very difficult to complete even once, with individual runs asking a lot of the player and taking a long time to learn well enough to reasonably expect a chance at survival - for my (mildly subpar) skill level, Nuclear Throne is a good example of this. The other approach is to set the bar for completion a little lower, such that a player won't have to make too many attempts before they know enough to have a good shot at winning. In exchange, these games will allow the player to steadily unlock higher and higher difficulties with each win, turning the knobs up on that easier base gameplay. Balatro is a great example.
Peglin is very much like Balatro in this regard. Once you complete your first run, probably without more than a handful of solid attempts, you'll unlock the Cruciball. (I should mention now, this game is full of the worst, most on-the-nose puns you'll ever hear, so get used to hearing them.) The Cruciball is a 20-tier difficulty system in which each tier adds one additional handicap on top of all the previous ones. Beat the game on Cruciball level 1, you unlock level 2, and so on. I'll be upfront and say that this isn't my preferred style of game design, but I did spend a considerable amount of time with it, managing to reach Cruciball 12 during my ~40 hours of gameplay.
The Cruciball system has two substantial flaws. The first is that unlocking these difficulties on one character won't carry over to the others. Once you've played for a while, you don't really want to slog through the lower tiers again without a good reason, and the different characters aren't that different, so I felt compelled to limit my progress to the default rather than spend hours building it back up just to try with someone else. Secondly and more significantly, the difficulty curve relies on death by a thousand papercuts. Individually, none of the debuffs seem that substantial - enemies have a little more health, bombs do a little less damage, you get a little less gold, etc. But the sum result from dealing with them all at once is that after a point, maybe around level 9 or 10, the difficulty spikes quite a bit and you start losing more and more runs to bad luck and snowballing mistakes.
Part of this comes from the available strategies. At the end of the day, your core gameplay here is never going to change that much. In Hades, you might approach certain combat scenarios differently using a sword than you would a bow and arrows, or prioritize different aspects of your moveset like dash attacks. Peglin is pretty much always going to be shooting the ball towards whichever pegs are most valuable to your current build and hoping for the best. There are several main categories of builds you can work towards and none of them really change this. You can go for slime, applying different properties to some of the pegs you hit, but most of the options in this camp are unpredictable and don't give you a lot of control over what happens. There's Ballwark, which generates defense points to absorb incoming damage, but I never found a way to make it worthwhile and didn't feel like netdecking to find the combos. The one I went with pretty often is Spinfection, a poison ability that continues to inflict pain in the turns after landing a hit, and I'd usually try to pair it with piercing orbs to hit multiple foes each turn. But again, these effects really don't give you a lot of room for lateral thinking or alternate strategies. You shoot the ball and hope for a high number.
But for me, the difficulty level and tactical options are less important than the ability to play skillfully and make calculated decisions to overcome the odds. You can hone your mechanical execution in Hades and stand a chance at high heat levels, or play the odds in Balatro and go for a risky hand. But in Peglin, so much of the game is left up to chance that you can very abruptly lose a run without feeling like you made any major mistakes. Some of this is because certain encounters basically demand specific strategies, without which they become borderline impossible. Beating the Ballista boss without any piercing or overflow attacks is borderline impossible, and you might not even have access to any by the time you get there. The progression of the world map contributes to this as well. The map of each world has you traveling downward, electing to go either left or right after each room. You can see on the map which rooms are guaranteed encounters, which are guaranteed treasure or shops, and which ones are question marks which might contain any of the above or special events. But your choice of navigation is made by shooting your ball through the remaining pegs and getting it in the appropriate hole, and sometimes the layout of the pegs makes it virtually impossible to know which way you're going to go. Careful routing can be thrown off by a single bad bounce or an event space with an unpredictable board layout or even bad luck when the game decides which pegs to clear after a battle. And even if you navigate correctly, those question mark spaces have a good chance of either throwing you into a combat or even miniboss encounter you'll have no means of preparing for, or serving you up a negative event that'll eat some health or tamper with your deck in the worst ways.
The top portion of the first world's map - the dotted lines represent branching paths from each encounter.
One of the big differences between Peggle and Peglin is that you don't simply want to clear out all the pegs in a level; you actually want as many pegs around as possible to keep scoring on. To facilitate this, the board will always have a Refresh peg that spawns in a random location and stays there until hit, at which point the entire board is restored and the Refresh peg moves to a new location. Peggle would place some parameters on where its special pegs could spawn on each board, but Peglin seems to make no such exceptions; if it spawns somewhere obstructed, there are very few workarounds except to spend shot after shot chipping away at it while you soak up damage. Peglin's physics are decent, if less predictable and weighty than those of Peggle, but careful aim only helps so much when the shot you need is geometrically inaccessible. The same goes for the crit peg, which moves randomly after each shot, though at least that's easier to mitigate and not as crucial to every build, but in both cases a run of bad luck can make it pointless to continue the run even if you sqeak through.
See, your access to everything in this game is dependent on having gold. You can only heal by paying gold after battles. Orbs are primarily purchased and upgraded using gold. But even if you save up your money, you might never find anything you want to buy because access to different strategies is so unreliable. It's really the relics that dictate what's worth going for, and by the time you're past Cruciball 10 you start to question if you should even begin a run if you don't have a preferred relic in your starting options. Bad encounters mean you need to spend gold healing, which means you have less gold to buy and improve your orbs. This could lead you to think you should settle for less than ideal orb purchases to get by, but one of the biggest newb traps in the game is how difficult it is to selectively remove anything from the deck - expensive once-per-shop-space purchases and a scant few random events are the only controlled methods. Exercising tight control of what goes into your deck is the ticket to higher level wins, which makes the early game even more important to manage your finances and keep your health up. In fewer words, the game gradually devolves into "bad start -> restart -> repeat" until you get something going, at which point you hope you don't draw a tough battle... or get funneled into a more difficult path by bad post-battle RNG... or get heavily disruptive random events that skewer your strategy.
I'll also mention here that (as of the time of writing) the game is severely lacking in the level of polish I expect from a $20 indie title. The fast forward options are a little janky and, while necessary to remove some of the tedium, make the action feel quite a bit less satisfying. More than once I've had crit or refresh pegs fail to spawn, costing me the run, when none of my relics should have interfered with it. Turning the volume all the way down leaves the game slightly audible, and I had to mute the program in Windows to get it truly silent. Controls can't be rebound. Tapping the space bar will shoot even when you're viewing your map or inventory. I've had the game chug during busy turns, I've seen it hang after every shot for several additional seconds. Most of the time it's fine, sans a couple of annoyances, but at this price point it should have a much more refined user experience.
And with all that being said, I can't say the game is unfun. I had a really good time with it at first. The first time I found a broken combination and aced the final boss was great fun and some of the relics promote interesting and risky types of play that I wish were more viable. You can probably get a good 20 hours out of this before you get to the point of frustration - more if you level up the other characters - and with so few options in this genre, it's worth a try for diehard fans. But once you've seen most of the content, tried out a few different builds, notched a few victories, it simply doesn't have the depth to keep pushing through runs that die on the vine for reasons you couldn't control.
Recommended If You: Are desperate for more Peggle-like gameplay; want a game marginally more engaging than Roundguard; enjoy extremely forced puns.
Peglin is one such example: Peggle, but it's a roguelike. For the uninitiated, Peggle is like pachinko or Plinko or what have you, where you launch balls down into a board full of pegs, and your goal is to hit and eliminate them. It's earned a surprising level of respect and nostalgia in recent years and there isn't much like it on the market today. Roundguard attempted the same roguelike twist a few years ago and failed to fully capitalize on the concept, but Peglin recently came out of a years-long Early Access development to try and scratch the itch. This review was written based on the 1.0 Steam version on PC.
In terms of roguelikes, Peglin feels closest to Slay the Spire, containing a similar branching map system and elements of deckbuilding. The basic premise of a Peglin run is this: you select a character (each of which has different starting properties), select a starting relic (relics provide passive always-on abilities and perks), and start clearing rooms. After each encounter, you have a chance to buy some items or health, then shoot your ball through the remaining board to travel either left or right down the fork in the map to continue to the next room. At the bottom of the map is a boss; beat it and you go to the next world, beat all three worlds and your run is successful, and then you can go again on a higher difficulty.
Now, combat is pretty simple. You have an inventory of orbs - balls - which effectively constitute your deck. These orbs will have different properties and damage values, and at the start of each battle this deck of orbs will be randomized and presented to you in a linear order. Each turn, you shoot one of your orbs through a field of pegs. For each peg hit, the orb scores damage according to its stats, and if you hit the crit peg that damage is stepped up to the orb's crit value. At the top of your screen is a line of enemies advancing from right to left towards you. The sum of your shot is then dealt to whichever enemy you're targeting (or the closest one within line of sight to your target), and then the enemies will all move towards and/or attack you. Then it's your turn again, you use the next orb in your deck, rinse and repeat until you win or lose. You'll get gold from certain pegs and from killing enemies, and you can use that gold after each battle to restore HP and buy or upgrade orbs; the curation of the orbs in your inventory is where the game's deckbuilding components really come into play.
A typical encounter from early in a run.
With the basics laid out, we can talk about what goes wrong. First, you need to understand that there are two very different schools of thought when it comes to roguelike difficulty. The first entails making the game very difficult to complete even once, with individual runs asking a lot of the player and taking a long time to learn well enough to reasonably expect a chance at survival - for my (mildly subpar) skill level, Nuclear Throne is a good example of this. The other approach is to set the bar for completion a little lower, such that a player won't have to make too many attempts before they know enough to have a good shot at winning. In exchange, these games will allow the player to steadily unlock higher and higher difficulties with each win, turning the knobs up on that easier base gameplay. Balatro is a great example.
Peglin is very much like Balatro in this regard. Once you complete your first run, probably without more than a handful of solid attempts, you'll unlock the Cruciball. (I should mention now, this game is full of the worst, most on-the-nose puns you'll ever hear, so get used to hearing them.) The Cruciball is a 20-tier difficulty system in which each tier adds one additional handicap on top of all the previous ones. Beat the game on Cruciball level 1, you unlock level 2, and so on. I'll be upfront and say that this isn't my preferred style of game design, but I did spend a considerable amount of time with it, managing to reach Cruciball 12 during my ~40 hours of gameplay.
The Cruciball system has two substantial flaws. The first is that unlocking these difficulties on one character won't carry over to the others. Once you've played for a while, you don't really want to slog through the lower tiers again without a good reason, and the different characters aren't that different, so I felt compelled to limit my progress to the default rather than spend hours building it back up just to try with someone else. Secondly and more significantly, the difficulty curve relies on death by a thousand papercuts. Individually, none of the debuffs seem that substantial - enemies have a little more health, bombs do a little less damage, you get a little less gold, etc. But the sum result from dealing with them all at once is that after a point, maybe around level 9 or 10, the difficulty spikes quite a bit and you start losing more and more runs to bad luck and snowballing mistakes.
Part of this comes from the available strategies. At the end of the day, your core gameplay here is never going to change that much. In Hades, you might approach certain combat scenarios differently using a sword than you would a bow and arrows, or prioritize different aspects of your moveset like dash attacks. Peglin is pretty much always going to be shooting the ball towards whichever pegs are most valuable to your current build and hoping for the best. There are several main categories of builds you can work towards and none of them really change this. You can go for slime, applying different properties to some of the pegs you hit, but most of the options in this camp are unpredictable and don't give you a lot of control over what happens. There's Ballwark, which generates defense points to absorb incoming damage, but I never found a way to make it worthwhile and didn't feel like netdecking to find the combos. The one I went with pretty often is Spinfection, a poison ability that continues to inflict pain in the turns after landing a hit, and I'd usually try to pair it with piercing orbs to hit multiple foes each turn. But again, these effects really don't give you a lot of room for lateral thinking or alternate strategies. You shoot the ball and hope for a high number.
But for me, the difficulty level and tactical options are less important than the ability to play skillfully and make calculated decisions to overcome the odds. You can hone your mechanical execution in Hades and stand a chance at high heat levels, or play the odds in Balatro and go for a risky hand. But in Peglin, so much of the game is left up to chance that you can very abruptly lose a run without feeling like you made any major mistakes. Some of this is because certain encounters basically demand specific strategies, without which they become borderline impossible. Beating the Ballista boss without any piercing or overflow attacks is borderline impossible, and you might not even have access to any by the time you get there. The progression of the world map contributes to this as well. The map of each world has you traveling downward, electing to go either left or right after each room. You can see on the map which rooms are guaranteed encounters, which are guaranteed treasure or shops, and which ones are question marks which might contain any of the above or special events. But your choice of navigation is made by shooting your ball through the remaining pegs and getting it in the appropriate hole, and sometimes the layout of the pegs makes it virtually impossible to know which way you're going to go. Careful routing can be thrown off by a single bad bounce or an event space with an unpredictable board layout or even bad luck when the game decides which pegs to clear after a battle. And even if you navigate correctly, those question mark spaces have a good chance of either throwing you into a combat or even miniboss encounter you'll have no means of preparing for, or serving you up a negative event that'll eat some health or tamper with your deck in the worst ways.
The top portion of the first world's map - the dotted lines represent branching paths from each encounter.
One of the big differences between Peggle and Peglin is that you don't simply want to clear out all the pegs in a level; you actually want as many pegs around as possible to keep scoring on. To facilitate this, the board will always have a Refresh peg that spawns in a random location and stays there until hit, at which point the entire board is restored and the Refresh peg moves to a new location. Peggle would place some parameters on where its special pegs could spawn on each board, but Peglin seems to make no such exceptions; if it spawns somewhere obstructed, there are very few workarounds except to spend shot after shot chipping away at it while you soak up damage. Peglin's physics are decent, if less predictable and weighty than those of Peggle, but careful aim only helps so much when the shot you need is geometrically inaccessible. The same goes for the crit peg, which moves randomly after each shot, though at least that's easier to mitigate and not as crucial to every build, but in both cases a run of bad luck can make it pointless to continue the run even if you sqeak through.
See, your access to everything in this game is dependent on having gold. You can only heal by paying gold after battles. Orbs are primarily purchased and upgraded using gold. But even if you save up your money, you might never find anything you want to buy because access to different strategies is so unreliable. It's really the relics that dictate what's worth going for, and by the time you're past Cruciball 10 you start to question if you should even begin a run if you don't have a preferred relic in your starting options. Bad encounters mean you need to spend gold healing, which means you have less gold to buy and improve your orbs. This could lead you to think you should settle for less than ideal orb purchases to get by, but one of the biggest newb traps in the game is how difficult it is to selectively remove anything from the deck - expensive once-per-shop-space purchases and a scant few random events are the only controlled methods. Exercising tight control of what goes into your deck is the ticket to higher level wins, which makes the early game even more important to manage your finances and keep your health up. In fewer words, the game gradually devolves into "bad start -> restart -> repeat" until you get something going, at which point you hope you don't draw a tough battle... or get funneled into a more difficult path by bad post-battle RNG... or get heavily disruptive random events that skewer your strategy.
I'll also mention here that (as of the time of writing) the game is severely lacking in the level of polish I expect from a $20 indie title. The fast forward options are a little janky and, while necessary to remove some of the tedium, make the action feel quite a bit less satisfying. More than once I've had crit or refresh pegs fail to spawn, costing me the run, when none of my relics should have interfered with it. Turning the volume all the way down leaves the game slightly audible, and I had to mute the program in Windows to get it truly silent. Controls can't be rebound. Tapping the space bar will shoot even when you're viewing your map or inventory. I've had the game chug during busy turns, I've seen it hang after every shot for several additional seconds. Most of the time it's fine, sans a couple of annoyances, but at this price point it should have a much more refined user experience.
And with all that being said, I can't say the game is unfun. I had a really good time with it at first. The first time I found a broken combination and aced the final boss was great fun and some of the relics promote interesting and risky types of play that I wish were more viable. You can probably get a good 20 hours out of this before you get to the point of frustration - more if you level up the other characters - and with so few options in this genre, it's worth a try for diehard fans. But once you've seen most of the content, tried out a few different builds, notched a few victories, it simply doesn't have the depth to keep pushing through runs that die on the vine for reasons you couldn't control.
Recommended If You: Are desperate for more Peggle-like gameplay; want a game marginally more engaging than Roundguard; enjoy extremely forced puns.
#30
The Admin Tower / CalRef Development Journal 40:...
Last post by Luca - May 24, 2024, 02:48:42 PMCalRef VII
What? We're Still Doing These?
Evidently!
What's Up With This Sick Theme?
You likely noticed that there's a hot new theme for the forum that dropped around the 3rd of April. This theme is called Silvehn, it's named after Emily's Elven nation theme, and took approximately six eye-bleeding days working basically non-stop. I've kinda found that I've developed this frustration with everything on the internet looking generic and corporate. So, going forward, I'd like to really bring back colour and return to an internet era where every website actually looked different from every other website.
Read/unread icons are the Refugia Culture department icon, but they're coloured in unique ways depending on what hasn't been seen. The redirect icon is also available as a Dot rotato icon, born out of this [wallpaper] I recently made up in inkscape (which is actually a literal joy to work with). The board logo is a slightly saturated version of the same style we had in Endar, and the post editor is made up of styles and icons of that era. The background is not mine, though it is licensed, and about everything else is made from scratch. This theme renovation improvement also allows for more permissive avatars, as well as threads you've posted in being easier to spot.
Osmium? A New Server??
Finally, a wiki theme fit for vampires and goblins.Yes, me, this is also true, we now have a new Debian 12 server called Osmium -- a name picked by poll popularity. Every now and then I reach a point where I feel like I can't get a version of something that I want, usually Python, and it boils down to the version of Debian. There's also bountiful things that accompany such upgrades, such as added security, whatever that is. Personally I just let Amazon and ByteDance pound the server like a thirteenth century French brothel, and assume everyone else does too.
Amazingly, this sort of subconscious awareness that the time had come to renovate the server is well-sourced. Apparently, the Refuge has almost always swapped to a new VPS every three years since forever. So I suppose I am just following a long tradition under the guise of free will and choice. Hydrogen was officiated, to my recollection, in December of 2021, so we're a little early, but that's alright. Now we have new and nifty things like Python 3.11 and PHP 8.3.
PHP 8.3 is great*, but also means that the wiki died. So part of this upgrade involved spending a significant amount of time manually upgrading the wiki, its mods, and its database, incrementally, from 1.31 to the latest long-term support version 1.39 and its six additional patches. I believed, however, that flashy version numbers going up wouldn't get the blood pumping, so I added and briefly spent some time modifying a dark mode theme. Being a staunch traditionalist, I have not made it the default theme, but it is available for you to use at this very microsecond by visiting your [preferences] and selecting DarkVector.
No.
But! I'm excited to give you old things. The deal with programming is that it's a never-ending learning process. Every time you do something, you learn how to do it better again by making it. Downside is that you already did it, so you can either waste time doing it again or move on to something else. Oftentimes I'm more than content to do the latter, but recently I decided to take some actual programming classes to shore any gaps in my knowledge that came from the haphazard way I figured things out on my own, without formal training.
The vast majority of content was material I already knew, but what I didn't turned out to be very helpful. I think [Eyebeast] benefited from this a bit in terms of accessibility improvements and the lord, our God, Google's blessed search rating. So, now that's been done up, visit it today! Or as often as you normally do, and note that it is marginally better than it was this time three months ago.
One other notable update to share is that I've followed in the footsteps of Refuge admins' passed and put up the source code on Github for others to study and learn from, or politely suggest improvements. It is released under the 'if you smelt it you must dealt it license'. Visit and star the [repository] today, or whatever people on Github do.
But I Said Give Us Nummy Nummy New Things!
No.
Also! You might think that my next stop on this journey would be to, then, ground-up improve Tart.CalRef, and you would be correct. But I also think that I'm marginally better at figuring things out with code than I used to be, so I wanted to do something unusual while improving it. In this, I decided to recode Tart.CalRef in PHP. Mostly to prove to myself that I could learn a language that I have never worked in before and spit out something modest in it without any framework.
I also just thought that PHP would be more suitable for handling Tart than python with flask and, now after having done it, feel like that was a pretty bang-on assessment. I'm not a PHPist, so probably professional PHP developers can find a dozen things to poke holes at, but for my purposes I think it's put together relatively well. More importantly, Tart is now faster, scores 100 on lighthouse ratings in every category, and has basically zero dependencies.
I have also made its code available through a public Github [repository] so that you can look on it with awe and terror, and also to get an idea of how you can parse a data dump with PHP. It is released under the do whatever as long as you keep the copyright license.
Shall There Be Nummy Nummy New Things in The Future?
Not really. Maybe. It's classified.
What? We're Still Doing These?
Evidently!
What's Up With This Sick Theme?
You likely noticed that there's a hot new theme for the forum that dropped around the 3rd of April. This theme is called Silvehn, it's named after Emily's Elven nation theme, and took approximately six eye-bleeding days working basically non-stop. I've kinda found that I've developed this frustration with everything on the internet looking generic and corporate. So, going forward, I'd like to really bring back colour and return to an internet era where every website actually looked different from every other website.
Read/unread icons are the Refugia Culture department icon, but they're coloured in unique ways depending on what hasn't been seen. The redirect icon is also available as a Dot rotato icon, born out of this [wallpaper] I recently made up in inkscape (which is actually a literal joy to work with). The board logo is a slightly saturated version of the same style we had in Endar, and the post editor is made up of styles and icons of that era. The background is not mine, though it is licensed, and about everything else is made from scratch. This theme renovation improvement also allows for more permissive avatars, as well as threads you've posted in being easier to spot.
![[wallpaper]](https://calref.ca/post/ns/flags/full/GreenWeek2024.png){kind=link}
Osmium? A New Server??
Finally, a wiki theme fit for vampires and goblins.
Amazingly, this sort of subconscious awareness that the time had come to renovate the server is well-sourced. Apparently, the Refuge has almost always swapped to a new VPS every three years since forever. So I suppose I am just following a long tradition under the guise of free will and choice. Hydrogen was officiated, to my recollection, in December of 2021, so we're a little early, but that's alright. Now we have new and nifty things like Python 3.11 and PHP 8.3.
PHP 8.3 is great*, but also means that the wiki died. So part of this upgrade involved spending a significant amount of time manually upgrading the wiki, its mods, and its database, incrementally, from 1.31 to the latest long-term support version 1.39 and its six additional patches. I believed, however, that flashy version numbers going up wouldn't get the blood pumping, so I added and briefly spent some time modifying a dark mode theme. Being a staunch traditionalist, I have not made it the default theme, but it is available for you to use at this very microsecond by visiting your [preferences] and selecting DarkVector.
* it's still PHP
More! Give Us Nummy Nummy New Things!But! I'm excited to give you old things. The deal with programming is that it's a never-ending learning process. Every time you do something, you learn how to do it better again by making it. Downside is that you already did it, so you can either waste time doing it again or move on to something else. Oftentimes I'm more than content to do the latter, but recently I decided to take some actual programming classes to shore any gaps in my knowledge that came from the haphazard way I figured things out on my own, without formal training.
The vast majority of content was material I already knew, but what I didn't turned out to be very helpful. I think [Eyebeast] benefited from this a bit in terms of accessibility improvements and the lord, our God, Google's blessed search rating. So, now that's been done up, visit it today! Or as often as you normally do, and note that it is marginally better than it was this time three months ago.
One other notable update to share is that I've followed in the footsteps of Refuge admins' passed and put up the source code on Github for others to study and learn from, or politely suggest improvements. It is released under the 'if you smelt it you must dealt it license'. Visit and star the [repository] today, or whatever people on Github do.
But I Said Give Us Nummy Nummy New Things!
Also! You might think that my next stop on this journey would be to, then, ground-up improve Tart.CalRef, and you would be correct. But I also think that I'm marginally better at figuring things out with code than I used to be, so I wanted to do something unusual while improving it. In this, I decided to recode Tart.CalRef in PHP. Mostly to prove to myself that I could learn a language that I have never worked in before and spit out something modest in it without any framework.
I also just thought that PHP would be more suitable for handling Tart than python with flask and, now after having done it, feel like that was a pretty bang-on assessment. I'm not a PHPist, so probably professional PHP developers can find a dozen things to poke holes at, but for my purposes I think it's put together relatively well. More importantly, Tart is now faster, scores 100 on lighthouse ratings in every category, and has basically zero dependencies.
I have also made its code available through a public Github [repository] so that you can look on it with awe and terror, and also to get an idea of how you can parse a data dump with PHP. It is released under the do whatever as long as you keep the copyright license.
Shall There Be Nummy Nummy New Things in The Future?
Not really. Maybe. It's classified.
Report all errors to the local authority.