Ingress – Tips and Cheats: The Ultimate Strategy Guide

Ingress is Google’s massively popular mobile game that has been on Android for some time, and has now finally just made its way over to the iPhone. This alternate-reality hacking game has its fans driving bizarre routes around cities, meeting up and geeking out, and building portal collections all over the world as the two main factions (Resistance and the Enlightened) duke it out for domination. Read on for some tips and tricks for Ingress!

Your main goals are to do the following: collect XMP, deploy resonators to make new portals, link one portal to the other, then to another, then to another and create fields, and finally, to hack friendly portals for goodies and to use blasters to attack and destroy the other faction’s portals, then steal them for your own faction. From then on, it’s rinse, lather, repeat, in different locations.

No matter what other guides tell you, it’s always valuable to blast other portals AND to set up your own portals, links, and fields. You might as well, because when you’re hacking friendly portals you’re earning the items with which to do all of these anyways. No matter what level you are, offense is generally easier than defense in Ingress, making it possible for even junior players to jump in and start smashing fields.

Don’t ever play Ingress while driving, but do involve automotive travel as a force multiplier. Team up with a friend, one of you as the driver and one of you as the player, and switch off. Or, take the bus or another form of public transit and ride around your city collecting XMP, hacking friendly portals, setting up portals and destroying fields. Or ride bikes around the city, or even motorcycles, stopping in parking lots to do some hacking and destroying and then moving on.

If you are going to cheat by spoofing your geolocation, you have to do it in such a way as to look natural and not get yourself banned from the game by Google. To do this, you’ll have to try to move in a manner that looks like you’re walking or biking. If you are going to spoof, get into the most crowded city center that you can so that you barely even have to move, and so that you have massive portal farms to explore.

If you want to switch factions, you are going to have to delete Ingress, then reinstall it and make a new account for Ingress. Or, go to the Device menu and you will be able to sign out under your username, then sign back in either under a new name or under a friend’s name (the friend’s name part makes it easy to do the car-team strategy).