Ingress newbie data

Ingress is a video game played in the real world on top of the GPS system.  It’s an interesting

combination of foursquare (for the checkins), geocaching (for the exercise) and king of the hill (for the combat aspect).

 

You need a battery, and a really good cable

The Ingress app runs some heavy animation, the GPS functions, and the network pretty heavily.  Your native battery has 1-2 hours of playtime in it, so all Ingress players carry an extra battery.

Buying the battery is not rocket science.  Learning that the standard charging cable is insufficient to keep up with the power drain is an eye opener for most of us.  You’ll know when this fails because you’ve got an external battery plugged in, your phone is charging, but the battery level keeps dropping anyway when you find yourself in Oakland on Telegraph Avenue screaming “KHA-A-A-A-N!”

Buy a good cable that’s 24 gauge, like this one from Monoprice (Android <$4).  I’m not familiar with iPhone cables, so you’re on your own there.

The game requires you to be social, or at least have a few acquaintances

Like most other games that have a long-term player arc, you need to earn experience and gear to continue advancing, which means you need to grind.

One of the things you do when grinding is take over and populate portals with resonators, and as you progress, you will find that you can only place a limited number of higher level resonators on each portal, even if you personally are a higher level than that.  Here’s a list of limits:

• 8 x L1 Resonators
• 4 x L2 Resonators
• 4 x L3 Resonators
• 4 x L4 Resonators
• 2 x L5 Resonators
• 2 x L6 Resonators
• 1 x L7 Resonators
• 1 x L8 Resonators

Starting at Level 2, you can only place 4 Level 2 resonators portal.  However you won’t spend much time at Level 2 and every portal you populate is going to get blown away quickly by higher level players so it doesn’t matter what you deploy.

However you will be stuck a while at levels 5, 6 and 7, and the portals you populate have a chance of sticking around, so you want to make them as strong as possible.    Before you leave on a grinding run, you want to be able to know “Do I have enough resonators to populate the portals I blow away with the strongest combo of resonators?”  Here’s a handy guide to what quantities of resonators you need:

• Level 5 players: 2xL5, 4xL4, 2xL3
• Level 6 players: 2xL6, 2xL5, 4xL4
• Level 7 players: 1xL7, 2xL6, 2xL5, 3xL4

If you don’t have resonators in these sufficient quantities, it’s probably best that you go farming for gear rather than trying to take over lots of territory.  (Unless you’re just hitting portals to bring down fields for AP, in which case you probably suspect they’ll be retaken quickly.)