Defending Your Portals

So you've taken the time and energy to take a portal and now you want to keep it, but that is often easier said than done. The enemy faction is constantly blowing it up. And now you have to rebuild it.

First understand that it is not possible to make an impenetrable portal. No matter what you do a Level 8 player with enough L8 XMP Bursters can (currently) take down any portal no mater how well defended it is. But some times it is a war of attrition you know they can take it, but make them work their butts off for it.

Keep it Charged
The easiest thing you can do is keep your portal fully charged. This basic step helps no matter what other tactics you use. A weaker portal is an easier one to take down.

Portal Mods

Portal Shields - Your portal shields are your basic building block of portal defense. Their defense rates range from 10 mitigation for common shields (the green ones) to 30 for the very rare ones (the pink ones).

Force Amplifier - These are nice mods to use in conjunction with other portal modifications, but you will not want to stack your portal with Force Amps because after deploying the first one you get less protection from each additional one. The first one deployed does double the damage to an attacker.

Turret - This great portal mod gives your portal more attacks.Like the Force Amp you do not want to stack these up on a portal because of diminishing returns. You will want to combine it with other portal mods. Placing a turret on your portal will have your portal attack an attacker twice but will also give a hit bonus of 30%.

Links
A not so commonly known fact is that links, either incoming or outgoing, provide a defensive bonus to portals. One link gives about a 10% defensive bonus to a portal. Each additional link gives less of an increase until you have 8 links. A portal with 8 links gets a 50% bonus, but after 8 links there seems to be no advantage.

Other Portals
Another interesting trick you can use to protect a portal is use other portals around it to defend it. The picture below is a local level 8 farm. The portal circled in red has no defensive portal mods, but rather heat sinks and multi-hacks. The portals around it have shields force amps and turrets. This is great for farming. We have 14 L8 portals and one is a very fruitful portal. You can walk the path of this artsy park and each sculpture has a portal. Then the monument in the center has the multihack and heat sink. As you walk the path, you can hit each portal and every 2nd or 3rd sculpture hit the monument. Walk the path a few times and you have hopefully loaded up on some goodies. The outer perimeter portals protect the inner one. An attacker would sustain significant XM losses and have to use many additional XMP Bursters to take down the farm. It's not impossible, and happens somewhat regularly, but it takes a lot of resources on their part to do.

Portal Keys

Yes, Portal keys can be a very effective defensive tool. When you get the alert on your scanner that you have a portal under attack, start recharging the heck out of it. Eventually your portal may fall, but once again you have cost the attacker to deplete their inventory much more than they otherwise would have. 

With these tips hopefully you can defend your portal well and atleast annoy the heck out of any would be attackers.

Happy Hacking

Ingress Version 1.28.1 Released

I haven't been following +Ingress  as much lately for a variety of reasons, so this release caught me by surprise. But this was a very welcome surprise.

I woke up this morning, and my scanner showed it had automatically updated Ingress. (By the way if you haven't set your phone/scanner to auto upgrade this is an app I definitely recommend allowing the auto upgrade). Initially I didn't think much about it, but when I launched Ingress on my way to work I was really impressed.

The first and most noticeable upgrade is Portal Vectoring. This is an awesome tool. If you have no portals in view on your scanner you will get pop ups with direction and distance to nearby portals. You can also immediately see the portal level and which faction controls that portal.

This solves one of my major complaints about Ingress. If you were in an area with you are not familiar with, it could be hard to find portals. I am really excited about this portion of the upgrade.

Other important features include the release of 5 new portal mods.

• Multi-Hack - Now there are "blackhat" methods of multi-hacking a portal. Now it appears that you now have the opportunity to "legally" multi-hack. But the number of multi-hacks will be limited before the mod burns out.
• Turret - This is another long awaited mod. But I am not quite certain of just how powerful they are going to make this mod. What we do know is that it will increase the number of defensive attacks on an enemy hacking a portal. But will it increase their strength? Will it automatically attack enemy faction players who get within range even if they do not attempt to hack? These are  some of the rumors out there.
• Link Amp - As the name implies this will amplify the distance between points of possible links
• Force Amp - This mod boosts the force of an attack on a portal
• Heat Sink - When hacking a portal you must wait 5 minutes between hacks. If you try to hack again too soon you get a message telling you the portal is in a cool down period and you must wait. This mod greatly reduces this time. The question remains: will this prevent portal burnout?

Happy Hacking