Seeing around the sites there are tons of people who can't figure out what to do with this game when they start, I decided to attempt to be helpful. Here's what you should do when you begin playing.
-Do all the training missions! These are your game tutorial. They're not the greatest thing, but it shows you the real basic things you have to do to be successful.
-Do all the training missions again! If you don't understand something, try redoing the training missions. Especially if you live out in the sticks like me and don't have any portals within walking distance, this is something to do to check out the game and have some fun.
-Make sure you are at max XM as much as possible. When you first start, you don't have a full bar of XM. Spend some time walking or driving around to fill up your XM bar. Try to always have this bar as full as possible so you can always act when necessary. Almost all actions cost XM to perform. KEEP THE BAR FULL. (Protip on filling XM bar, hop in the car and drive around for 10 minutes does it for me at low levels)
-Farm farm farm. In the beginning, the game is pretty boring. You can't go nuke the opponent's city to oblivion because you don't have any armaments. Even if you did you wouldn't have any resonators to secure the portals for yourself. Spend however much time you deem necessary farming up tons of stuff. TONS of stuff. Not like 5XMPs. 5 XMPs won't do anything. You need more like 50 XMPs. Get yourself armed to the teeth no matter if it takes days. Especially if your city is owned by the opposing faction. You will get 100AP for hacking enemy portals to farm stuff up, but you will get more items from your own portals. You can hack portals four times in a four hour period, with a five minute cooldown between each hack. It's wise to find an area with 4-5-6 portals you can walk around in a circle between that takes five minutes. If there are two areas like that even better. Try to hit those places before work, maybe on lunch if you can, and before you go home. Gather up as many level 1 XMPs, resonators, and shields as you can BEFORE your assault. This is also good practice for later, because no matter what stage of the game you're playing, you will be farming a ton. You might as well become efficient at it now. (Some out there say to ask your faction for low level items as they have them. I don't agree with this line of thinking. You will level more quickly this way, yes, however you will not have the knowledge of the battlefield, the AP gain from hacking enemy portals, and you won't have a good idea of the people playing around you as you won't be reading the com for as long) (Also you will have tons of portal keys, those are useful)
-When you have a sufficient ammount of level 1 XMPs and resonators, go to town. No really, go into town, and start taking it over. XMP mechanics are pretty straightforward. Stand ON TOP of a resonator before you begin attacking, then attack till the one you're standing on is gone. You will do ~15% on average to the one you're on top of, then lesser damage to the nearest resonators to your location. I believe the latter number is between 4-7 from experience, however I can't say for sure. After that one is down walk ACROSS the portal to the one across from you and take that one down. Again, your splash damage will weaken the other resonators. If you started with the northmost resonator, second would be southmost, then you'd go to either east or westmost and repeat till the portals are down. It takes a lot of XMPs to take down a portal with eight resonators of your same level, and even more with shielding deployed. That's all you got at level 1 so you will need tons and tons of XMPs. After you've taken down the enemy resonators, it's time to deploy your own. Drop eight of those bad boys and some shielding if you have it and go to the next closest portal. Try to get three portals very near each other. This will make life easier.
-When you've taken 2 portals in a very small geographic area to each other, it's time to link. Access portal menu, choose link, select destination, and gain a buttload of AP. (Note that the destination portal key will disapear from your inventory when you link and you'll have to rehack it to acquire another)
-Now that you have 2 linked, go for a third. When you've secured the third link it with the other 2 and create a control field. Control fields are the factor in who has the global control. The more control fields covering the most landmass, the better your faction is doing at that point in time. This is all fleeting, however it's a huge part of the game. Creating a control field is another huge boost to your AP.
-By now you're at least level 2, probably level 3 if you're creating fields. You now understand what to do to play the game alone. This is not a solo game though. It's cool to go out by yourself and wreck some shop, yes. Yes it is. I enjoy doing that. You won't establish long term control doing that though. The key in the early game is to level, and you level faster by playing alone, maybe getting some items from a teammate. Now that you're knee deep in the fight, it's time to work together with your faction. Set up days where you will either meet up or get on IRC or something and all go to a location to take over the city. Plan your attacks and fortifications ahead of time, who goes where and does what. Then plan to keep it up.
Hopefully this long winded post helped some people. I don't think I could do any more for you unless I come to your house, steal your phone, and play the game for you. There are other sites around with theorycrafting that explain the exact mechanics of how XMPs and portal shields work. At the outset this isn't all that important to know, and some trial and error will help you to understand what they're saying in the theory craft posts. Good luck out there, but only if you're an agent of the Resistance :-$
-Uribam
-Do all the training missions! These are your game tutorial. They're not the greatest thing, but it shows you the real basic things you have to do to be successful.
-Do all the training missions again! If you don't understand something, try redoing the training missions. Especially if you live out in the sticks like me and don't have any portals within walking distance, this is something to do to check out the game and have some fun.
-Make sure you are at max XM as much as possible. When you first start, you don't have a full bar of XM. Spend some time walking or driving around to fill up your XM bar. Try to always have this bar as full as possible so you can always act when necessary. Almost all actions cost XM to perform. KEEP THE BAR FULL. (Protip on filling XM bar, hop in the car and drive around for 10 minutes does it for me at low levels)
-Farm farm farm. In the beginning, the game is pretty boring. You can't go nuke the opponent's city to oblivion because you don't have any armaments. Even if you did you wouldn't have any resonators to secure the portals for yourself. Spend however much time you deem necessary farming up tons of stuff. TONS of stuff. Not like 5XMPs. 5 XMPs won't do anything. You need more like 50 XMPs. Get yourself armed to the teeth no matter if it takes days. Especially if your city is owned by the opposing faction. You will get 100AP for hacking enemy portals to farm stuff up, but you will get more items from your own portals. You can hack portals four times in a four hour period, with a five minute cooldown between each hack. It's wise to find an area with 4-5-6 portals you can walk around in a circle between that takes five minutes. If there are two areas like that even better. Try to hit those places before work, maybe on lunch if you can, and before you go home. Gather up as many level 1 XMPs, resonators, and shields as you can BEFORE your assault. This is also good practice for later, because no matter what stage of the game you're playing, you will be farming a ton. You might as well become efficient at it now. (Some out there say to ask your faction for low level items as they have them. I don't agree with this line of thinking. You will level more quickly this way, yes, however you will not have the knowledge of the battlefield, the AP gain from hacking enemy portals, and you won't have a good idea of the people playing around you as you won't be reading the com for as long) (Also you will have tons of portal keys, those are useful)
-When you have a sufficient ammount of level 1 XMPs and resonators, go to town. No really, go into town, and start taking it over. XMP mechanics are pretty straightforward. Stand ON TOP of a resonator before you begin attacking, then attack till the one you're standing on is gone. You will do ~15% on average to the one you're on top of, then lesser damage to the nearest resonators to your location. I believe the latter number is between 4-7 from experience, however I can't say for sure. After that one is down walk ACROSS the portal to the one across from you and take that one down. Again, your splash damage will weaken the other resonators. If you started with the northmost resonator, second would be southmost, then you'd go to either east or westmost and repeat till the portals are down. It takes a lot of XMPs to take down a portal with eight resonators of your same level, and even more with shielding deployed. That's all you got at level 1 so you will need tons and tons of XMPs. After you've taken down the enemy resonators, it's time to deploy your own. Drop eight of those bad boys and some shielding if you have it and go to the next closest portal. Try to get three portals very near each other. This will make life easier.
-When you've taken 2 portals in a very small geographic area to each other, it's time to link. Access portal menu, choose link, select destination, and gain a buttload of AP. (Note that the destination portal key will disapear from your inventory when you link and you'll have to rehack it to acquire another)
-Now that you have 2 linked, go for a third. When you've secured the third link it with the other 2 and create a control field. Control fields are the factor in who has the global control. The more control fields covering the most landmass, the better your faction is doing at that point in time. This is all fleeting, however it's a huge part of the game. Creating a control field is another huge boost to your AP.
-By now you're at least level 2, probably level 3 if you're creating fields. You now understand what to do to play the game alone. This is not a solo game though. It's cool to go out by yourself and wreck some shop, yes. Yes it is. I enjoy doing that. You won't establish long term control doing that though. The key in the early game is to level, and you level faster by playing alone, maybe getting some items from a teammate. Now that you're knee deep in the fight, it's time to work together with your faction. Set up days where you will either meet up or get on IRC or something and all go to a location to take over the city. Plan your attacks and fortifications ahead of time, who goes where and does what. Then plan to keep it up.
Hopefully this long winded post helped some people. I don't think I could do any more for you unless I come to your house, steal your phone, and play the game for you. There are other sites around with theorycrafting that explain the exact mechanics of how XMPs and portal shields work. At the outset this isn't all that important to know, and some trial and error will help you to understand what they're saying in the theory craft posts. Good luck out there, but only if you're an agent of the Resistance :-$
-Uribam
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