Thursday, June 13, 2013

Ingress: Linking And Fielding Types

Linking and fielding has got to be my favorite part of the game. The geometry of it all gets me.

(1) One school of thought that dominates the thinking in the city (and was even more severe before links started acting as shields) is that you should not create links and fields at all, because if you do you are only creating opportunities for enemy agents to get points. I always thought that was the stupidest thing. The thinking was and is that if you want to hold your territory just do not create links and fields. You are less likely to get attacked. As if you earn points for holding onto portals. I think you should, but right now you don't.

(2) Another way is to create as many links and fields as you can. And there a simple formula is, link to whichever portal is the closest to you. That way you will not mess it up. If you link far away portals you are depriving yourself and others of link opportunities, since links can't cross each other.

(3) The most efficient linking and fielding might be the spokes to a wheel method. You pick one portal as the hub and make it deliberately weak. And you link to that one portal from all the neighboring portals. This works best for home territories where you are likely to hack the same portals again and again and are likely to have many keys to each portal. This might also be the fastest way to gain points. The hub gets captured. You capture it again and build all those links all over again. In less than 10 minutes you might end up with 50,000 points. This spokes of a wheel method of fielding also might be the most efficient use of your portal keys. And the best way to cultivate your home territory. Say you manage to build a home territory with about 100 portals, and so when the fielding is done you earn 100,000 points. And you have a local team of agents on your side. Granted all of you do a great job of hacking the portals and always having plentiful keys, you could end up with the fastest way to level up your agents. The game does not care if you are a L1 or L8. You still get the same keys when you hack portals and you still get the same points when you create fields.

Where is your hub? Do you even have one?


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Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Ingress: Jackson Heights Mysteries


This past weekend the Enlightened in Queens organized a L8 farm event in Jackson Heights which has emerged as the top Ingress destination in the borough, both in terms of its central geographical location and, more important, its growing cluster of portals (mostly, thank me).

I know exussum has a car, I know chicory has a car, I know Avumede has a car. I don't understand why they chose to walk. Pi and Huze disrupted them after just two hacks. In a car they could have burnt out the whole thing in 20 minutes flat. Pi and Huze showed up an hour after the green gang got started.
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