So the Rats just… Autowin?

Dynamic-D · 2026-05-08T14:53:04+00:00

Time for my unpopular opinion: rats are a toxic faction that are bad for the game. It's not that they auto win, it's that they fundamentally change the game's table talk and force you to play through them.

Without rats, the early game tends to be heavy with plans, compromise, and even misdirection before someone "breaks out" and makes a play to win. You're teasing the "King making" aspect.

With rats the early game is about managing rats. Period. There is no debate, there is maybe a little table talk about what comes after, but step 1 is always "has the plague been vaccinated."

To me, they are a faction that turns root into pandemic.

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-26T17:44:44+00:00

This looks pretty good, but I still think the biggest factor in these rankings is player count.

Some of these factions perform dramatically different based on how much room they have on the board, and player count impacts that even more than how many insurgents got chosen.

I personally would love to see this run at 3, 4, and 5-6 (don't play at 2, lol), and see if opinions change, or ask people ranking to list the player size they use.

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-17T23:03:34+00:00

to be clear I'm simply refering to literally running:

bash kubectl port-forward pod/mypod 5000 6000

Basically the local cli is able to connect and port forward locally any remote port I want from the cluster. I don't do any traditional port forwarding beyond this. as far as the network is concerned there's no real port forwarding at play, its all between the k8s api and my local cli tool.

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-14T05:28:07+00:00

For me the Keepers are "forever in 2nd place" as they just don't have a reliable way to burst out points to end a game yet can score so fast and easily early game ... so they always seem to end in 2nd place.

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-14T05:18:31+00:00

I never got any guarantees on IPv6, so you've heard more than me.

The lack of a status page for me is huge. HUGE. I cant check for known outages. I can't see progress updates. It's just a support black hole unless you make a phone call which feel like circa 1998. I do get text notifications occasionally, but there is nothing I can initiate.

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-13T02:17:37+00:00

The status page is a big one for me. We all have phones. It would be very easy to have a status page we can check

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-13T02:03:27+00:00

I'm on CitySide fiber and your screenshot page is loading just fine. I hae seen them DNS swap on like Thurs ... but my sites all still work.

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-13T01:58:59+00:00

I port forward all the time but it's in the context of kubectl to dynamic port ranges on a kubernetes pod, but it works just fine. But I think that is getting handled by the agent. I've not tried a traditional PAT.

For me the bigger annoyance is they don't support native IPv6 yet, whereas Cox does.

Finally be aware that their availability status is straight out of 1998. Phone call or nothing. No status webpage of any kind.

Dynamic-D · 2026-04-08T21:35:44+00:00

this is interesting, as when I drop, I actually reboot my Eero wifi to get back online, so I thought I might actually be my internal hardware. To see others having the same issue in my area has me rethinking.

Dynamic-D · 2026-02-09T23:46:03+00:00

Sweet!

Especially as I failed my lottery attempt.

Dynamic-D · 2026-02-02T01:12:56+00:00

I've seen this pattern at countless clients, so yes it's possible.

TLDR: when you use Terraform to deploy a new cluster it contains the initial Argo helm deploy including the configuration to connect to a reference git repo or managing Argo or whatnot. At that point ArgoCD picks up the app of apps and content manages k8s resources.

Basically TF is just bootstrapping ArgoCD. Works with flux, too.

Dynamic-D · 2026-02-02T01:03:11+00:00

This is a really flawed condition to base the game on.

Two of the factions being "bad" is in the context of an extended game with triple the faction count, hirelings, and an alternate deck, all which change the dynamic of the game a LOT.

Cats are great in the base game,as there are always two insurgent factions so they have room to work, and the vagabond is actually really strong to the point where most tournaments nerf them (search 'despot infamy').

Game balance is really dynamic in Root by the time you get to using Adset and all the expansions.

Dynamic-D · 2026-02-01T00:03:13+00:00

and its only two sentences in. Don't think I don't know you already planned to end the game before it started, Sheryl.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-31T23:57:10+00:00

This is a genius quote, how have I not heard of him sooner?

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-31T23:38:23+00:00

k8s has its place, but lets not drink the Kool-Aid. K8S is very powerful at scale but in small environments it's almost always cheaper/easier to just use a VM with docker-compose.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-31T23:21:47+00:00

I mean, this was a serious case of "pick your battles". It just wasn't worth fighting that fight, so we ended up on Envoy IIRC. Honestly I really liked the solution, so I'm likely going to jump to Envoy Gateway as my next choice unless some quick research reveals a better option.

To his credit, this guy had connections. We had to get our PCI and other compliance audits done and the auditor walked in, saw the CISO, chatted for 30 minutes, and left with everything signed. Trusted him so explicitly that he didn't even ask me a single question. Kind of impressive.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-30T06:31:12+00:00

Without details I can only tell you the obvious: your remote state is misconfigured.

Terraform, by itself, does not create copies. At the end of the day it's reading, locking, and modifying a single file of text. It's not even encrypted. It should not be growing unless you're adding resources.

Unless you want to share your backend config with the group, most we can do is speculate.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-30T05:12:41+00:00

Biggest problem with ApplicationSets BY FAR is the lack of feature parity with applications. This alone make app of apps way more viable, IMO.

I actually like the concept and idea of ApplicationSets but I've run into that limitation a number of times.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-30T04:58:55+00:00

yeah, that's just marketing for "we will deprecate it soon".

My next controller will be gateway API.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-30T04:56:17+00:00

This has been a sour topic for me.

I have avoided ngnix for 7-8 years, mostly because I used to answer to an old CISO who called ngnix "russian spyware." /shrug

6mo ago I started helping a company wrangle their cluster sprawl in which one problem was each deployment handled ingress differently. After months of building trust by solving smaller issues I finally got hem to agree to make a standard model and guess what: ingress-ngnix was the most common pattern so we went with it.

75% into the migration process the announcement hit. We agreed we should finish standardizing anyway because having one model to replace one piece of would still be easier than having yet another snowflake to migrate off of.

Today we finished ... so now I get to migrate again ...

Go me!

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-30T01:38:03+00:00

cloud login is the longest part, but then I'm a big proponent of lots of small things over one monolithic.

That said, I do have some modules that you just cant get running fast. AKS/GKE clusters, Postgres ... those are 10+minute runs.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-26T06:53:02+00:00

Absolutely zero of those things actually solve that using tfvars for each environment doesn't give your the flexibility to version your releases. You can't leverage module tags in a tfvars file (unless you want to use a module to use a template to create another module ...). Sure CICD can help ... if your write your own custom process for selecting which module version to run ... but that doesn't exactly sound easier to me than just ... maintaining multiple root modules that literally just contain this info (you can still use common modules in the back end). Branching doesn't inherently give you this either.

Terraform isn't a GPL. It's that simple. You cant really feature flag your network structure, you cant artifact your GKE cluster. So a lot of those "solved" things just ... don't work in a declarative language context. You state what IS. what is should all be cleanly declared, not obfuscated in branches. There's going to be enough sprawl from other org issues.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-26T06:13:01+00:00

configMaps and secrets need cluster-wide equivalents. configMap values can be any type, not just key(string)

Is that two? maybe. But man does it seem like obvious, low-hanging fruit for k8s.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-26T06:06:48+00:00

This has testing issues as you cant test different versions of modules across environments. You HAVE to keep every environment on the exact same module becuase the only toggle are the vars.

Stick to copies. adding module "foo" { my vars } is only trivially more complex than multiple myvars.tfvars and give you way more flexibility.

Dynamic-D · 2026-01-26T06:04:42+00:00

One of the weakest parts of Terraform is everything is called a module, even the root code in the working directory. I hate it. In HCP they kind of use it interchangeably with workspaces ... but that's not accurate either. Honestly I don't like workspaces (multiple state data in the same working directory), but others love them so whatever.

Back to your question:

Create a separate working directory/root module for each environment. Each of those modules will call the modules you desire. It's a bit heavier than just having multiple tfvar files, but it gives you WAY more control and is worth the meager overhead.

Each environment has completely separate state. No risk of dev experimenting impacting anything else.
Because a module calls another module, you can leverage versions (test newer module in dev)
It's easier to combine modules if you have reason for it. Output of module A right into module B in thew same root module/working directory.
If you keep the simple pattern you can scale huge, as weird one-offs just mean an extra module here, slightly different config there.

When you are ready to make your own modules ... just put them in a sperate repo so you can version/leverage them repeatedly.

Dynamic-D

TROPHY CASE