How long did it take to find you at first? Mine had a hard time finding me inside an apartment building.

I joined the Enlightened because it probably doesn't matter and because you did.

So is this kind of similar to geocaching? I'm told I would like it.

Yasha wrote:

invite plzkthx

Done.

Is there any benefit to being invited by someone? I forgot about that possibility and just signed up on my own. Then I actually captured a gray portal and now I'm level 2!

Wahey!  My first few control fields were tiny, 1 MU each.

As for benefits of being invited… I don't know!  I've never invited anyone before, and I haven't seen anything that's changed since.

Wow, you've got huge control fields, Sat!  My largest is a little over 200, I think.

I dinged at L6 today!  I was really expecting to do it last week, but I wasn't making it to school on top of work, what with being sick, and the community college is where I seem to do my major point collection.

Yeah, low-level play is like, focus on capturing portals and links, watch everything you build get wiped out fast, wash, rinse, repeat.  The most useful thing you can do for your team is probably recharging and putting decent mods on high-level portals.  That said, you can start making an impact taking out mid-level enemy portals around L3 or L4, and at L5 I held onto a portal for eight days, but that was probably thanks to whoever threw a couple L8 anchor resistors on it.  I can't wait to find a good target for my new L6 attack powers, so far I've taken on a well-defended L7 portal and had a non-negligable impact, so that was something.

But I also think it all depends on what sort of level the players around you are, and how active.  Like, there's one person who passes by every now again and completely fucks shit up for the green team in the area, and I don't think there's anything I can do about it, I can just make it harder, I can't stop them. And one time I saw a portal that was completely kitted out in L8 resistors and good-quality mods, and it was all one person.  Given that I can only place two L5 or L6 resistors and two mods, I don't even know what kind of level you'd need to be to be able to do that.

When you attack, you're attacking both the portal and the resonators (not resistors, whoops).

You can destroy mods by attacking the portal, and possibly links?  I don't know.  I… uh, I've destroyed about two mods on their own, so don't count on being able to do this, your best tactic right now is probably to attack the resonators.  You change the alignment of the portal by attacking the resonators, when you've destroyed all the resonators on a portal it becomes neutral.  So… yeah, where the resonators appear on the map actually matters.  If they're within your action radius, they get direct damage from an xmp, while the damage to resonators outside of your action radius is much less.  If you use an Ultra Strike, you should be standing RIGHT ON TOP of whatever you're trying to attack, the radius of significant damage is like, a few feet.

My advice is to find a couple of resonators on a portal with minimal mods that's about your level, (and preferably already damaged) go stand on it, and then try out your weaponry.  After a while, you'll get a sense of how much affect you can have on various situations, and start being able to pick fights were you'll be able to destroy some stuff, since resonators that aren't destroyed can be recharged.

As for how to tell how damaged a resonator is, there will be a little bar by it in the portal action menu thing, and the height of that bar tells you what the health/energy of the resonator is.  This doesn't show up in the attack screen and it's a little annoying, but you get the percentage signs.  A good sign is if you're doing double-digits damage to one or more resonators, but… don't expect that unless it's a really low-level portal or you've gained some levels.

As far as the site goes… hmmm.  I've definitely heard of people talking about how getting higher levels allows for more resonators of higher level to be placed on a portal, but these people were also talking about using control fields in ways I can't really work out- that is, you don't break an enemy control field by capturing a portal inside it.  But I do think there will be some benefits after L8, and it certainly isn't more gear to use.  I'm guessing the person who wrote that site made it up to L8, but there are much higher level players around here.  Scrolling through the top agents, I see a lot of L15's and L16's, but there's also some higher-ranked agents of lower levels, so that's definitely not all there is to it.  And I know the portal I saw had switched hands in the last couple of days, so I don't think we're looking at a case of something being grandfathered in.

As far as meeting up with other players in your area, from what little I've seen, that seems to be the norm in a lot of places, or at least the makers of the game want us to think so.  Here, though, there's so many people that there's not really much of a community in the city.

Oh, and as a side note, have you noticed and/or familiarized yourself with the level colors yet?  They range from L1 (yellow) to L8 (indigo) and they're all noticeably different, to the point that I think I could list them all, and you'd be able to recognize them if you saw them.

Last edited by Kita-Ysabell (01-26-2015 03:29:52 PM)

satyreyes wrote:

I have one more newbie question: how come sometimes I get portal keys from hacking and sometimes I don't?  Is it purely at random?  I've been lucky so far, but it seems like random portal keys would make it hard to plan linking ops.

I've noticed that too. It makes it harder, which I suspect might be the point.

Kita-Ysabell, thanks for the tip with Ultra Strikes. I managed to waste my first one by standing on top of the portal itself. It also means that there are some portals I just can't hit very well because GPS goes nuts near some taller buildings.

Viva La Resistance! I joined the blue team and am literally just starting my training. PM me for my e-mail if you want to add me.

Okay, I  started playing again and own a portal now. I'm still figuring this game out, but I am almost to level two so I must be doing something right. Does anybody know what a Mind Control Unit is? Whatever it is I have one. I need to join my local Resistance chapter.

Actually, I think you can make lines inside your own fields, but not the other team's.  I know I've got some Mega Points for making triangles within triangles.

Also, I just looked up glyph hacking.  And I'm level 8.  Yeah.  Have yet to try it, mind.

(hint: hold down the "Hack button" for a while and see what happens)

I just started playing! It looks fun. I'm green, because the friend who invited me is green and I wanted to be on his team. Nice to see that most of you are green too. But I'm too proud to throw shade at those of you who play blue.