Slice of Chaotic Life

Went to Grimstad again today, a town in the province east of here.

I have delayed this for a long time, partly because of the burning sun of the past month, partly because of my capricious digestion, and partly because traveling in Norway is expensive. But when my bus card between Mandal and Kristiansand expired, I replaced it with one for both of the provinces on the south coast of Norway. It was more expensive, but strangely not by much. And it feels good to just walk onto any bus and wave the card in front of the ticket machine on my way in.

The night saw thunder and lightning and hard rain; the morning was overcast, which was expected to last for much of the day. At least the lightning was gone where I was. I went to Kristiansand first, and had time to hack and recharge some portals before going on the next bus.

In Grimstad, all the ten portals downtown were claimed by my ally, who had put a level 1 resonator on each. I am not even asking where he got those from – I have long ago recycled my level 1 and 2 resonator and most of the level 3, even though I actually need some of those to make portals alone (as mentioned last time).  I upgraded every portal to level 4 and put shields on them. I did not link any of them though. They are in his territory, and if there is a newbie as well (and not just a tourist) linking is THE way to level up fast. If worse comes to worse and the blues retake the portals, they won’t get any AP from taking down links and fields (which is second only to building them). I admit that linking all those portals would have taken me quite a bit closer to level 6. But as mentioned yesterday, level 6 comes with its own problems. I prefer if all the Enlightened agents on the south coast can get there at near the same time, or at least the two of us who have been active here for a while.

UPDATE: 1 hour later

Well, two higher-level Enlightenment agents seem to have arrived shortly after I left and further upgraded the portals. One of them is level 8, the other probably level 6 (or else he is out of higher resonators, but in that case the other would probably have lent him some in order to build a stronger portal). They even linked some of the portals. I sincerely hope that was the level 6 doing, as action points are wasted at level 8 – it is the highest level.

They kindly left one of my level 5 resonators on each portal, so I’ll still get alerted if the portals are attacked. That, and they were probably only able to add 1 level 8, 1 level 7 and 4 level 6 resonators, which leaves two level 5 anyway.  Still, they could have replaced my level 5s with level 6 and my level 4 with level 5, it would have given them slightly more action points. Wise of them to not do that – if the portals are attacked while we are awake, there will now be four agents with ownership to them. If all of us have keys (and there has been a surge in portal key drops just lately) then it would be almost impossible for one or even two Resistance agents to take them down even if they stood on top of the portals.

The portals are now level 6, so if they have hacked them to the fullest, they should have a good supply of everything except level 8. Good job guys!

Our agent in Birkeland is back in action. He has rebuilt his home base and claimed all the portals in Grimstad, even if only symbolically. There also seems to be another, lower-level Enlightened agent in the area, as a portal east of Kristiansand has been filled with level 1 and 2 resonators. This is good news, obviously. The more agents, the higher portals we will be able to build eventually.

At level 5, I can supply myself with appropriate gear from level 4 portals; but at level 6, things start getting harder. You can have up to 4 resonators on one portal at level 2, 3 and 4; but at levels 5 and 6 you can only add two of each, and at 7 and 8 only 1.  My portals today are (2*3+4*4+2*5)=(6+16+10)=32/8 = 4 average. But starting next level they will be (4*4+2*5+2*6)=(16+10+12)=38/4=4 (truncated). You need a sum of 40 to get a level 5 portal and get appropriate loot from hacking. Level 6 resonators drop very rarely from level 4 portals, so claiming portals will bleed you of level 6 stuff. It can be lived with if you don’t have any opponents tearing down the portals, but this is not realistic in the long run. There will always be visitors.

The whole thing changes if you have an ally.  Even at level 5, an ally would be able to upgrade two of my level 4 resonators to level 5, taking the portal from 38 to 40 points, for an average of 5. That way we would both be able to harvest a reasonable amount of resonators and bursters. Unfortunately the thumbscrew tightens again at level 7.  At this point we both need to be level 7 for it to work. Two level 7 agents would be able to make (2*7+4*6+2*5)=(14+24+10)=48, for an average of 6.

If we ever reach level 8, we will need more people to even have a decent chance to get some lvl 8 gear from time to time. The two of us would just make (2*8+2*7+4*6)=(16+14+24)=54/8=6,75=6. So that would land us mostly level 6 gear, some level 7 and level 5, and rarely if ever any 8. However, if we could get a third agent to level 8, we would have (3*8+3*7+2*6)=(24+21+12)=57/8=7, which should be enough. Getting a pure level 8 portal is another matter, it would require 8 agents at level 8. This should not be necessary, unless there is something about high-level hacking that I don’t know, but it would help people build up a reserve of level 8 gear for a lean season, for instance when their allies are on vacation. ^_^

I managed to claim the portals in and near the park yesterday. This morning before going to the office, I went down to the harbor and claimed the new portals near there. I had a few portals there already, but it is a bit out of the way for me so I usually just remote recharge them. There is not much need for keys either, since they can’t be linked to from the north. Neither can those in the park, so I am not planning to stock up on keys from them … but I’d like to have at least one of each so I can remote recharge them.

There are still two unclaimed portals within walking distance, but on the east side of the river, so 10 minutes at best to walk from the closest active portal. I plan to get those tomorrow. The weather is overcast today for a change, but my body is worn down and I need some serious sleep to wind up the mortal coil!

Another agent discussed the situation of being alone Enlightened in a town, and the problem of getting adequate resonators. At level 5 I can easily make level 4 portals, and these will give drop an almost ideal mix of resonators, spanning the interval 3-4-5, with about half being level 4 and some more 5 than 3 (probably because it considers both the level of the portal and of the agent). The problem is if you start with only level 2 portals, they won’t drop the level 5 resonators you need, and rarely enough level 4. I still think it should be possible to work your way up by collecting level 3 and 4 resonators over time to make a level 3 portal, then farm it for level 4 and 5 resonators to make a level 4 portal. Once you have one of those, add multihack mods to it and farm it for hours, siccing your dog / parrot / grandma on anyone who approaches without warning. Or you could visit another town and hack high-level portals there. ^_^

This morning, after I had arrived in Kristiansand, I saw something unusual on my scanner. I was remote-viewing one of the portals I maintain, using a portal key. I noticed there was a gray portal nearby, and another near that again … I found several gray (unclaimed) portals around in downtown. The park in particular had so many you could barely tell them apart with the usual overview mode, but might have to zoom in a bit to see them all. They were all surrounded by XM, so the whole park was almost covered in white. I have seen this density of portals on the map of central Oslo, where it covers a much larger area, and I refer to it as “quantum foam”. (This is just a joke, in physics quantum foam is supposed to exist on a submicroscopic level.)

So now I have an area in the middle of Kristiansand that is densely packed with portals and filled with XM. This will give high-level attackers an edge, as they can fill up their scanner before attacking a portal. Of course, any successful attack is likely to make me stronger as well, as I have the same bubble bath of XM available to retake the portals once the guests are gone.

I stopped by the Clas Ohlson hardware store chain, which has a shop in Kristiansand, and bought a rechargeable external battery pack for mobile phones and similar.  It holds 6600 milliampere-hours (wouldn’t that be 6.6 ampere-hours?) or almost twice of the rather impressive built-in battery in my Note 2. So it should be enough for a long day of Ingressing, if I start with the both of them fully charged.

The price was kr 499, a bit under $100. You can get more storage per dollar some other places, but here at least I have a physical shop I can go to and make a scene if it does not work as advertised. ^_^

Buying a rechargeable battery pack is something very likely to happen to Agents at some point in their career, because as your level increases, you tend to wander further and further from home. I was in Grimstad once, and if health permits, I will probably go there again soon. (Right now my digestive tract and related parts might resent that, but we’ll see.) I also upgraded my 30-days bus card, which expires tonight, so that from tomorrow it covers all of Agder (the province in which I live and the one east of here where Grimstad lies). It is a little more expensive, but if I make just one trip to Grimstad and back (as I did last month) it comes out roughly the same. Any more travel outside the daily commute would then be free. So let’s see if we find the time and health to do so.

I have also contemplated a trip to Oslo, which from the Ingress map seems to be covered in a quantum foam of innumerable portals. Most of those in the town center seem to be blue for some time now. Just a day of hacking those, even if I don’t manage to actually capture any of them, would probably give me more Action Points than weeks here. They are so densely packed that one should be able to hack dozens of them per hour. No wonder there is a number of Lvl 8 players in Oslo, some of whom I have never heard of until I saw their name on portal resonators. I’d need a serious calming of my digestion to keep hacking a whole day though. Not to mention I need to wait until the daystar stops burning me, which typically is 3-4 weeks from now, if all goes well.

For weeks and weeks, the ionizing radiation of this planet’s star has destroyed my outer membrane faster than I could regenerate it, forcing me to cut down on Ingressing during daytime, which happens to be when I am in town with most of my portals. (On the bright side, I have 21 keys to the nearest portal here in Mandal…)

Today there was a thick cloud cover. It even began raining. Water and shade! I went to the city and hacked nearly all the portals, some of them repeatedly. There aren’t any blue ones left, but that’s OK. It means I won’t advance as fast, but it also means my faction is happy. And I get to improve my inventory.

There is a limit of 2000 items in the scanner inventory. That sounds like a lot, and it is: I did not reach the limit until around the time I hit level 5.  If you play in a town where there is a strong opposition, it will probably take much longer. Most of the inventory is XMP bursters (used to destroy opponent resonators and free the portals from their influence) and resonators (to bind the portals to your own faction). It takes 8 resonators to fully contain a portal, and there are limits to how many you can use of each level, so you always need to carry an assortment of these if you plan to capture portals. Bursters are only necessary if you run into opponent portals, but this usually happens at least occasionally even here, since the city is a communications hub and people visit for various reasons.

Luckily for us who don’t see that much action, it is possible to recycle inventory items and get a small amount of XM (energy) from them. This again can be used to hack more portals or recharge resonators.  Lately the inventory is full all the time, so I have recycled the lowest level items. Now that I am level 5 and can make level 4 portals, most of the items I get from hacking are level 4 and 5, with some level 3. There are still some portals left by my allies that have not change hands, and are level 5 or 6. These tend to give level 5 and sometimes level 6 items. So I have deleted everything below level 3, and am now replacing my level 3 items with 4 and 5.  I still need some level 3 resonators to capture portals (two of them per portal, more exactly) but there aren’t dozens of portals to capture so I don’t need hundreds of them.

One thing you just don’t do is recycle portal keys, as you can share them with other players who can then link to the portals from their hometown. But 21 and counting seems a bit excessive for a portal that is normally blocked by other links… We’ll see, but it won’t be the first thing I delete.

At least thanks to the weather, I was able to hack portals in the city, where I don’t have an excess of keys. I have a few more now, though. ^_^

The two Resistance-owned portals on the east side of town had decayed so much that I felt sure I could take out at least one of them without power cubes, possibly both. I had hesitated to take them back, because they are almost 20 minutes walk (each way) from the nearest downtown portal, and located in an area with almost no free XM. So you have the XM in your scanner, and the XM of the two portals. If that is not enough, you have to wait for the portals to spawn a new wave of XM, which could take half an hour or more.

Luckily, I got both of them and still had enough XM left to fully equip them with resonators and a number of shields and and a turret. So it paid off. But it still took about an hour for those two portals. And quite a bit of walking, although I have recovered partly from the wear-down mid-week. (Tonight I slept until the alarm went off, something that is quite rare – it is set for the last acceptable bus, and I normally wake up by myself an hour earlier.)

I could have gotten a truckload more AP and take over 10 portals by traveling to Grimstad, but it costs money and also takes an hour each way. So walking it was, this time at least.

I took back the portal the joker from the Resistance took yesterday. (His nickname really means something like the joker, or the funny guy.) One of them was easy, since there were only two low-level resonators. The other two were worse, even though one of them was not fully outfitted either. The problem with these were that they were close together, so when I attacked one, I attacked the other as well, and they both zapped me. As a result, I had to take several walks to other portals in the area to recharge my XM, which was drained by the attacks.

The poor guy must have been spammed for an hour and half off and on by messages about me attacking his portals. He did nothing to defend them though, it seems. It would not have been that hard to do. Perhaps he will take them down again at some later time. That seems like a pointless thing to do, since I get to level up fairly quickly by this exchange, and he not at all. But who knows what people think.

Anyway, after about an hour and a half, I had rebuilt the portals and fields. But there is still quite a performance gap between a level 8 and a level 5, evidently. If I had not been allow to scratch the portals to death, he could have kept them for a very long time.  Of course, even hacking them gives Action Points, to you cannot really hold the opposition down if they have the home turf.