Ingress: Tactics—Why Smash and Leave?

Ingress is an outdoor, augmented reality game, with strategic and tactical elements. Kind of like chess where everyone’s having their turn at once, or a game of Capture the Flag, if there were multiple flags and the field was world-wide and the teams unlimited in their numbers with everyone kinda doing their own thing within a team framework. Anyway, I find it fun, and I’m always taking note of what the other side is doing so I can learn new tricks… and then undo it. Right? Cos that’s the game.

Anyway, way back in July, I noticed a continued pattern from the local greens (and one I see in some of the local blues, too, but not as many), and I’m seeing it not just the established players, but some of the newer ones to the area, as well. They’ll come in and smash a field, or a portal, but they won’t capture it, or, if they do capture it, they put a single resonator on it. It used to drive me crazy, because I couldn’t make sense of it - and then I found some Real Life constraints where it made sense.

Anyway, I looked at it over the last few months, and I still don’t get why it's such a common tactic, so I tried to figure out where the gain was, because I just can’t see it. If you break the smash-and-leave/minimal-deploy down into pros and cons, the results look a little like this:

Pros for smashing and leaving (or minimal capture):

• It denies the other team AP for smashing one of your team’s portals;
• It denies the other team AP for taking down your team’s links;
• It denies the other team AP for taking down your team’s fields;
• It leaves the portal an easy capture for members of your team who might need to add it to their unique portal count;
• It conserves your resources (power cubes, resonators, & mods);
• It reduces the amount of time you need to spend in one area;
• It gives you a fair amount of AP for minimal effort;
• It enables you to advance your Purifier medal;
• It reduces the amount of points the opposing team gains from smashing at the end of each cycle;
• It allows you to help out a team-mate when you don’t have a lot of time;
• It enables you to deny the enemy an asset when you don’t have time to do more;
• You can do it from the bus or as a car passenger as you go past;
• It lets you do something when you have a ton of other commitments and are fitting your Ingress in around the rest of your life.

Cons for smashing and leaving (or minimal capture)

• It leaves the portals vulnerable to enemy capture;
• It makes it easy for the opposing team to gain points for portal capture;
• It minimises the expenditure of resources the opposing team has to make in order to capture portal;
• It denies you the AP for portal capture (which is more than for portal destruction);
• It denies you the AP for creating links (which is more than for just smashing links);
• It denies you the AP for creating fields (which is more than for just smashing fields;
• It denies you the AP for resonator deployment (which is more than for destroying them, especially deploying the first and  last resonators on a portal);
• It denies you the AP for mod deployment;
• It reduces the AP you earn from visiting an area by almost two thirds;
• It slows your ability to gain AP and thus level faster;
• It prevents you from making advances on your Mind Controller medal;
• It prevents you from making advances on your Connector medal;
• It prevents you from making advances on your Builder medal;
• It prevents you from making advances on your Engineer medal;
• It prevents you from making advances on your Illuminator medal;
• If you leave the portals white, it prevents you from making advances on your Liberator medal;
• It prevents you from creating links that would hinder the other team’s ability to do so;
• If you are glyph hacking, it puts you at risk of filling your resources-carried quota, reducing your ability to hack, maintain your hacking streak, and gain AP from hacking;
• It significantly reduces the number of points your team gains at the end of each cycle;
• It makes it easier for the opposing team to rebuild the damage before the end of the cycle, and not lose points from your efforts;
• If you deploy only one resonator, it means your fellow team members cannot make a unique capture if they are in the area;
• If you do not capture and fully deploy the portal you deny your fellow team members the ability to make links of opportunity to portals they might have keys to, thus denying your team incidental opportunities to boost the score for the cycle.

Brief Analysis:

Looking at the pros and cons I still can’t see much of a gain for smashing and leaving, or smashing and minimal capture, unless you are pressed for time and this is all you are able to do. Otherwise, the team benefits are less for smashing-and-leaving than they are for smashing-and-fielding, leaving the team score much reduced at the end of each cycle. (And this could go a long way to explaining why the Resistance in our area have won so many cycles in a row.)

Beyond the team disadvantages, there are the individual disadvantages for not fielding after you’ve gone to all the trouble of taking down an enemy field—I mean, why, unless you were already L16, or have to get to work on time, would you not make all the AP you could from fielding the area? After all, if the other team can do it, it’s not impossible, right? And then, even if you were L16, why would you not either advance your team’s score in the cycle, or take the opportunity to work towards your onyx in a medal you don’t have? Failing that, why make it easy for the opposition by leaving them a field of instant captures?

Even breaking down the pros and cons for this style of play, I’m still not seeing the advantage of smashing and leaving, unless you’re pushed for time and want to help out a team mate, or are just doing what you can in a busy Life schedule – in which case it does make absolutely, perfect sense.

Final Comment:

In early September 2017, I made almost a million AP in 5 days of micro-fielding. If I’d had to stop to take down fields that had been put up in place of the one I’d built, my rate of progress would have been much slower, and I might have run out of the power cubes I needed to maintain my advance, as well as the weapons I needed to clear a path to expand on what I’d built. Granted, I would have made an additional third of AP on each area, but I don’t believe I’d have been able to do anywhere near as much fielding, if I'd had to smash, simply because I'd have been out of energy before I was done.