Excellent use of force and planing,Team work at its best!

Excellent use of force and planing,Team work at its best! 

Originally shared by Ingress South Carolina - Enlightened

#ingressfieldreport  Joe Philley  #ingress   #ingressenlightened  

Battle Report
The Taking of Columbia
8 December 2012

The #enlightened have been able to keep Greenville, SC under control, with only a little bit of #resistance activity in the area.  But we had noticed our brethren to the south in Columbia, SC have been having more trouble.  There are a few active Enlightened, but they are outnumbered and outgunned by the Resistance, and Columbia was rapidly becoming a blue town.  The Greenville Enlightened decided we needed to give them some support, so planning for our road trip began.

The Resistance field structure depended on just a few key nodes, and would have been easy to take down. But rather than focusing on destruction, we set our sights on capturing the entire city.  With the town buried under a green blanket, they wouldn't be able to put up any new fields. This would perhaps give the local Enlightened the opportunity to take down the existing structure while the local Resistance regrouped and scrambled to lift the suppression field. It would reset the playing field in Columbia.  At the very least, we'd let the Resistance know they no longer had the town under their thumb, and we could give the local Enlightened some moral support.

We knew we had a limited window of opportunity for this gambit.  The Resistance had begun linking up to some surrounding suburbs. (See the "Before" screenshot.) Given much more time their structure might grow too big to surround with our 81 km range, at least without a separate team to take out the links.  

For the week leading up to the planned raid, we scoped out portals that would max out the size of our capturing field, checked for intersecting links, and did our best to stockpile the L5 and L6 resonators that were key to achieving the range we needed.  The local portals were stingy with the high-level bounty, but on the morning of the attack we managed to leave with exactly the five L6 resonators we needed, and enough L4s and L5s to get the job done.

The driver on the mission was StratusEvent, an L6.  ZhaetorZhae was copilot and navigator, having stayed out late the night before to earn the L5 he would need to deploy the third and fourth L5 resonators on some key portals.  Chazwell remained back at home base, providing logistical and map support remotely.

The first part of the trip went smoothly. We went to the southwest corner of the triangle, powering up and shielding two portals a few miles apart, hacking to get the keys we'd need to link back in. The pair of portals gave us some planned redundancy, in case of unforeseen difficulties creating links at a later stage.  So far, we weren't worried about attracting much attention. We were claiming useless portals out in the boonies, far from any Resistance territory.

Ten miles after leaving this corner, we glanced at the mission checklist and realized we had made our first mistake: we had forgotten to link the two portals together.  This wasn't a critical error, but would prevent us from creatng some small fields later, along the edges of the triangle.  But since we weren't yet racing the clock, we decided to go back and fix the error.  While there, we took advantage of the opportunity to get an extra pair of hacks on the L4 portal we had built.  As if to reward us for our diligence, the portal gave up a scarce L6 resonator -- just the type that we had been hacking for in vain all week.  This would turn out to be a pivotal piece of hardware.

More than an hour later, we arrived at the southeast corner of the triangle.  Chazwell was monitoring the COMM channel and informed us that nobody seemed to be very active in Columbia. So far so good. We powered up another pair of portals, this time with resonators sufficient to reach back to the previous corner.  We also made some links, creating a pair of long, skinny fields that stretched 80 km, flanking the city on the south.

This is when we had our first scare.  Simultaneously, both of us saw notifications at the bottom of our #ingress scanners: "Your L6 resonator was destroyed... Your link was destroyed…"  Could the Resistance be this organized? Could they really have taken out our first pair of portals as quickly as we had gotten to the second set?  But we quickly realized that the news was merely bad, not disastrous.  These were portals back home in Greenville.  A pair of out-of-town Resistance raiders had come to our turf and started hitting portals in our backyard.  We could do little to defend, being hours away, but we heard from Chazwell that the home team was mobilizing to repair the damage. That battle on the home front would continue for hours, but without us. I don't know where angon and Emnybo, the invaders, are based.  I'm hoping they were Columbia players, who had driven north for the day. Not only would that have some poetic symmetry, but they would have returned home to find that their city had been buried in green while they were away.

In any case, now that we had played our hand, the race was on.  Any sharp Resistance members might see the flanking maneuver we had made, and be able to guess what was coming next.  If they moved fast, they could get to one of these corners and take it down before we could set up the other two legs of the triangle.  Our hope, though, was that our activity was outside the 24 km range of the "Local" COMM field and they might not notice right away.

This hope didn't last long, however.  Within 15 minutes, Chazwell informed us that there was some chatter on the Columbia public COMM pointing out the large fields to the south.  We had been noticed.  The talk calmed down after a while. Were they ignoring us? Watching to see what happened next? Or had they moved their strategizing to more secure channels? With the clock ticking, all we could do was continue to head north towards the planned apex of our triangle.

The anxiety level increased another notch as we got within 10 miles of our next pair of targeted portals.  Chazwell informed us that a Resistance member had posted "I'm almost there."  Where? Was he going after our links?  Could we get our fields up first?  As we drove into the tiny town of Winnsboro to deliver the final coup, my palms started sweating as the stakes mounted.  If we didn't manage to put up a large-MU suppression field after our day's work, it would be a disappointing loss.  It became all too easy to dwell on the things that could go wrong: the Resistance could take down our new portals, or one of our planned links might cross a nearly invisible L1 link in a tiny little town…

We arrived at the northern apex of the triangle, and began powering the portal that would deal the victory blow. Rushing to get it done, the two of us were both slapping on resonators simultaneously, when disaster struck: I upgraded, placed one of the crucial L6 resonators, watched it disappear from my inventory, and then… nothing.  The resonator didn't appear on the portal. It was no longer in my inventory. I hadn't dropped it by accident.  It was just gone.  Thankfully, we had the one spare L6 portal from the lucky hack earlier in the day.  If not, we wouldn't have been able to get the 77 km range we needed at this portal. Chance was on our side today -- either that, or the Shapers were looking out for us.  Disaster averted, we continued powering up the portal, shielded it, and began making links, the last of which resulted in a big fat field that buried Columbia and its surroundings under a beautiful layer of green.  Mission accomplished.

A mere formality now, we moved on to the redundant second portal at the northern apex, and linked it to the other corners, earning over 100,000 MU for the largest, outer field in the process. (See the "After" screenshot.) We had planned the double-triangle structure mainly as a failsafe in case one of our planned links was not possible. But our planning paid off, our luck held, and we were rewarded with a double-MU field covering the entire city. Over 2200 square kilometers in area (880 square miles). We celebrated by claiming a dozen or so unclaimed portals in the sleepy town of Winnsboro, ending the day with more than 200k MU for the good guys.

Still paranoid, we used our spare keys to check the portal strength on the ride home, fearful that a counterstrike was imminent.  As the time passed, though, we began to relax, and realized that the Resistance hadn't mobilized immediately.  The fields would stand, for the present.

It will fall soon enough, of course.  Even with the redundant structure, the Resistance only needs to take down two corners to bring down the suppression field.  But until then, they're unable to build anything, they're begging for help from allies hours away, and it will require time and hardware to take down our fields and defend against a repeat attack.  In the meantime, our field stands as a beacon, its green light reminding Enilghtened everywhere to keep their spirits up.  Even in a solid blue town, reinforcements are never far away, and the Resistance should always stay on their toes.

UPDATE:  The field stayed up for 22.5 hours. I really hope #nianticlabs  have some plans for portal defense, personal defense, etc.