My Daughter Made Level 8!

My daughter hasn't been an active player for a while. She got hooked into Ingress when I told her about the anomalies and she wanted to participate. Tried as we may to get her to 8 before Darsana, we just couldn't get there.

Since Darsana she has played a little here and there, mainly coming out with me when I want a little help taking out a particular portal. A few weeks ago I was hitting a few targets of opportunity while running some errands with her and she said she was going to play. She told me she was now so close to 8 she wanted to make a push for it.

We began heading out a few times, unfortunately time wasn't on our side. My typical playing time is generally from 10:00 pm to 1:00 am and I wasn't going to keep her out that long, so we went out in 1 hr bursts. One of our local Resistance players even kept tabs on her progress (Mainly because it was his portals we were hitting.) One night he sent a message on the COMM saying he was waiting up for her to hit again and level up. It turned out to be a little while before we could go out again.

This past Friday night. I was loaded with nearly 1000 L8 XMPs and was ready to do some damage to the Resistance dominated areas. I on the intel map I found a nearby portal with dozens of links and many, many fields coming and going from it. I estimated that portal alone would give her the AP needed.

We headed out and that portal was number 1 on our list of targets. We get there and I drop a handful of L8 Ultra Strikes on the center of the portal to kill the shields and then tell her to spam it with XMPs. Well I see the portal is going down as the field starts to look weak. Then next think I know it is full blown recharged. The resistance was recharging on her, and by the look of it several people were recharging. So I decide to help and fire off a few L8 Xmps. When it started looking weak I would stop as not to steal the AP from her, but they were relentlessly recharging.

So I then decided to spam it with L8 Bursters. It starts to get weak again. I back off to let her take it out, but they brought it up again. I start spam bombing again. Between the two of us we got it down to 4 resonators. By this time we'd each used probably 100 XMPs. But I back off again and again they are able to keep it fully charged against her. So I start firing again and what do you know one of my XMP bursters took out 3 of their resonators and I got the over 28K AP. I went ahead and took out the last remaining resonator too, but let her claim and fully deploy to.

In hind sight I would have walked to reach resonator and fired Ultra Strike to more strategically taken them out, and save on Bursters, then once it was down to 3 have her do the same. Oh well live and learn.

We went out and she did level up later that night and we were out until 4 am (and the wife was not happy about that).

So I am happy to now have a second powerful player in my family to help me.

Ultra Strikes Revisited

Okay it has been a while since Ultra Strikes have been available to everybody.

In my last Ultra Strike post I wrote that I didn't see the big deal about Ultra Strikes. Those opinions were based on not having used them, but only what I had read from others. Well now I have been using Ultra Strikes for just over a month and wanted to revisit Ultra Strikes.

Pros:
Their intense burst is effective at taking out individual resonators or helping weaken or destroy portal modifications.

They are commonly hacked, so getting them is no problem.

Cons:
Their burst while quite intense, has a very limited range.

They are much slower to launch than XMPs.

Lower level Ultra Strikes are relatively useless.

Conclusion:

The Ultra Strike weapon is an interesting tool. Higher level Ultra Strikes can help with heavily defended portals, but lower level ones aren't worth the effort.

Will I use Ultra Strikes? Why of course I will. Will they be my weapon of choice? No. I would prefer to consider them a tool rather than a weapon. When I come across that heavily defended portal I will weaken it with some Ultra Strikes and then go in for the kill.

So do they live up to the initial hype? No. Maybe it was just me, but from the initial hype I was expecting this incredibly cool and powerful weapon. But I wouldn't go as far as to say they are useless. They are functional tools, but not worth the hype and not worth the exclusivity they were first appeared with.

All else being equal I will continue to use L8 XMPs for the majority of my attacks.

Happy Hacking.

Is the Ultra Strike Worth All the Hoopla?

So the new Motorola Droid phones came out earlier this week. These phones were preloaded with +Ingress and when you activated your account on these phones you also got a goody bag of items including several of the the new Ultra Strike weapons. 

Now since these phones have been released Ingress internet sites have been buzzing on how to get hold of the Ultra Strike weapon if you do not have one of these phones. These theories run the full spectrum from crazy to to easy to be true. Some of you have even commented here on rooting your phone and altering your build.prop file to mimic or be seen as a Droid. 

Sounds interesting to me and why I am not a technical neophyte, I have learned that I know/think I know enough to end up getting myself into trouble, but do not know enough to get myself out of it. So I will pass. Besides I do not believe this would fall in line with the game's TOS.

Other than being complete Ingress addicts and just needing to have the newest stuff and try it out, I haven't seen anything that makes me say I need this new weapon. Sure I want to get my hands on one and use it, but I doubt it will be able to knock my socks of.

The fact that you are using one item to destroy one resonator doesn't impress me by itself. What would impress me is if this new weapon were able to do its job and not result in the portal attacking and draining my XM Energy.

The one cool advantage I see with this weapon is that you could strategically go and knock out resonators of your least favorite opponents, just to screw with them.

I'll update if I feel differently later.

Happy Hacking!

Ultra Strike - New Ingress weapon

I've been wanting to post about this for a while. In Episode 19 of The Ingress Report it was announced that there is a new weapon available for +Ingress . The Ultra Strike is a weapon designed to be used against enemy resonators. You can strategically target resonators for an intense burst on a resonator. This burst will have limited range. Ultra Strikes will come in various levels like resonators and XMP Bursters and presumably will be most effective on resonators of the same level or lower. We have been told these items will be pretty common.

And the fans go wild !!!!!!!!!!!!!

But, it was also announced that this weapon can only be hacked using the 3 new Motorola Droid phones...

Oh, not so excited anymore...

But all is not lost, sports fans. While it is still only available to be hacked by the new Motorola phones, they can be shared and used by anyone. Yes, it still makes the majority feel like 1st runner up in a beauty contest it's not all that bad. I personally see limited use for this as a L8 XMP Blaster is highly effective and will destroy so much more.

Initially I was disappointed that these would only be available on the Motorola Phones. But lets look at the money trail. Ingress is done by Google, Google owns/has substantial stake in Motorola. Samsung (The current largest mobile device manufacturer that runs Android)  is testing their own OS, Tizen, in what is seen to move free from Google/Android. So they want to get people to put their money in their own pockets. And honestly I would prefer them making money from Ingress this way versus allowing people to stock up on items by buying them like they are able to do on many games like Farmville.

If/when Ingress starts selling gift cards like this , I will probably be out...

Happy Hacking!