Lessons for a Level 1

Yesterday was the first time in a long time that I got to help a brand new Level 1 make their first field and get to Level 2.  As you spend more time playing a game you tend to take for granted the things that you learn as you level and forget that these things may not be obvious to a brand new player, so I'm going to go over a few things I helped our newest Level 2 out with yesterday.

Hacking is Agent specific and limited by time - Irregardless of how many other people hack a portal you can hack a portal every 5 minutes up to 4 times in 4 hours.  So if you hacked a single portal it would take you 15 minutes to burn it out.  I recommend burning out a portal as often as possible.

Portal Keys are Consumable - when you create a link to a particular portal you will loose the key for the portal you are linking to.  In the early days you couldn't get a 2nd key for a portal if you already had one in your inventory so you had to do some juggling to get more than one key. Luckily that was changed and now you can hold as many keys as you want for any portal.

You need a Portal Key to Remotely Recharge - If a portal is attacked and you have a key for that portal in your inventory then you can pull up the key and remotely recharge the portal.  This will still drain your XM but you will also get 10 AP per recharge.

Portal key drops are "random" - Meaning you can't predict when you'll get a key.  That being said the more often you hack a portal the more likely you are to get a key, so areas that you spend a lot of time in will most likely generate you a lot of keys for that area.

Stick with Smallest Fields to Start - Whether you create a huge field that covers miles or a tiny field that covers a couple of hundred feet you still only get 1250 AP for the field.  And once you make a large field you are very limited in what you can create underneath that field.  If you are under a field the only links you can make are to the points of the covering field.

In the image below portals under the large field can not be linked to each other they can only be linked to one of the triangle points that cover them.  When you start your best source of AP is linking and creating fields so the example below is a missed opportunity for AP.

That's not to say that as you get higher in levels it won't make sense to build fields that cover areas, in fact it can be quite a useful tool when utilized correctly.  But as a low level maximize your AP opportunity by building as many fields as you can.

Hacking enemy portals drains your energy - but it will also give you 100 AP, hacking friendly portals drains some energy but it also gives you some energy so it ends up being about a wash unless you're hacking really high friendly portals then you have to be careful about running out of XM.  In the beginning those 100 AP can help you level quite quickly.  When you hack enemy portals you may not get much if any gear but the AP really is worth it at that point in the game.

XM is NOT Agent Specific but does regenerate - Almost all portals should have a large XM pool around them (some exceptions for newly added portals).  If there is no XM around a portal you have arrived at then most likely someone from your team or the other team has been through recently and taken all the XM.  XM will repopulate, I'm not 100% sure on the time I think it's 15 minutes,  XM will also start to re-appear soon after a portal is brought back online.