Turns out that even though collecting various “uniques” is still likely the best bet for many players to get two more gold Ingress badges, it isn’t necessarily a quick task either. (Update: Playing Ingress on vacation is a good way to rack up some uniques, if you can get away to play.)
Yesterday, I managed to grab about 40 uniques, and squeezed out another 30 unique hacks this morning between dropping off kids and getting to work. Still, that’s a long way to go to get the next 681 needed for a gold Explorer badge. A local player says that there is a 100-ish portal cluster nearby. That might be my next move.
Getting unique captures for a gold Pioneer Badge is even a longer process. There, you need not only new portals, but new enemy portals. Then, you need to have the gear and time to take down those enemy portals and capture them. I know where there are some good enemy portal clusters. Unfortunately, most of those are heavily linked and shielded. Not that I don’t love a good fight, there is just a very big difference between racking up quick captures and taking down a big enemy field.
I guess it’s time to hit the Ingress Intel map and find clusters of Level 4 green portals, hopefully unshielded 🙂
Latest stats:
- 7,200,758 AP
- 1,129 / 2,000 Unique Portals Visited
- 616 / 1,000 Unique Portals Captured
My Ingress Manual 
We’re in the same boat right now (albeit I’m EN), I’m grinding on gold badges right now at 11, and while I’m a little behind you in AP, I’m slightly ahead on uniques. That’s probably boosted by my Interitus activity a week or so ago in Madision, and the fact I’ve submitted a lot more portals (so I have a head start on many captures as they go live). I’m sort of hoping they introduce a few new badges to suit other play styles, to avoid becoming a “grind”, like so many other MMOs.
I also wanted to drop a link here that might be useful when anyone finds a bad portal, or gets rejected on a good submit. Seems like many players still don’t know about portal appeals, the G+ community where you can appeal a new portal rejection, no-removal of a bad portal, or whatever the issue is that portal things placed through the scanner doesn’t address.
https://plus.google.com/u/0/communities/102464635958231746563
You’re on the wrong side: Getting green L11 is much easier, because you help to build the future, not suppress mankind development. 😉
Getting heavy linked and shielded enemy portals down isn’t that hard. L8+ players often forget that distance is a powerful weapon (especially since the latest updates): Place your scanner directly on a resonator and it’s gone shortly. Exactly on a portal to remove mods. I won a fight against a recharging smurf lately basically by changing to the other side of the street: The per-hit XM loss of the resonator doubled from 20 to 40%.
I find that taking down a single portal is never too difficult to accomplish. However, a properly linked and fielded cluster of portals can cost a lot of gear to take down more than a few of them.
Pingback: Almost to Level 11 | My Ingress Manual
Sorry to resurrect an old thread but am I right in thinking unique captures is very much a solo operation? I mean if you’re travelling in a team of 2 or more whoever deploys the first reso gets the unique capture and all the other player(s) going to get is a unique visit and a unique hack? Or do all players that deploy on a portal they’ve never visited before get a unique capture? Wouldn’t be hard to work out in practise, just never got round to it so, anybody know for sure?
Only the first deploy counts as a capture. For the missions, a deploy counts as a capture for the mission step if portal is already owned by your faction but not for the badge.
That’s what I thought, thanks. Oh well, back to making my first visit to a new city a solo one… 🙂
Oh, one more question then… If you miss out on a unique capture because you’re travelling as a team and you only get a unique visit & hack, if you subsequently visit it again solo after it’s been recaptured by the opposition and take it again, do you then get the unique capture you missed out on first time round? in other words does your unique capture count go up when you capture a portal for the first time, regardless of whether you’ve visited or hacked it before?
Yes.
“Unique captures” is the number of unqiue portales you captured, no matter if you hacked them or not.
But I still don’t know if a deploy also counts as unique visit.
You can travel as a team, just try to do it with folks who have already captured most of your target area. You get the benefit of someone who knows the area and still get the captures.
I wasnt a serious player, until recently. I wish I was since I was traveling a lot. Even with nor being too serious I was able to rack up gold medals for unique capture and hack. I know it will take a while to get onyx, but I will get there. I am going to Disney world and Universal in January. I should get a bunch there!
Pingback: New Badges Reduce Importance of Guardian Badge | My Ingress Manual