F@#$ Pokemon Go vs Ingress

Augmented reality games by Niantic!

Unless you've been living in a cave, you've heard of Pokemon Go.  If you are living in a cave, download Pokemon now because I bet you'll catch some rare monsters.

Pokemon Go was not the first.  Ingress was was launched around 4 years ago and Pokemon about 4 weeks ago.

The Plots/Basics

Ingress

Ingress is sci-fi themed.  The CERN collider released 'exotic matter' into the world which coalesces around landmarks forming portals.

There's two factions and some aliens involved.  The Enlightenment faction (color coded green) wants to help the aliens advance civilization.  The Resistance (Blue) is suspicious of the aliens and wants to stop them.  That's all the plot you're getting out of me, because 1) I don't really pay attention to video game plots closely, and 2) I don't really have a 2.  Uh...if you get interested in the game I don't want to spoil anything?

The game is all about the portals.  You hack them to get gear.  You claim them for the glory of your team, and also because then you get better gear.  You 'link' portals together forming triangles; this claims points for your team.  You attack them with gear to deny the same to durty durty resistance or the durty durty enlightenment depending on your point of view.  Basically, the game is a global version of capture the flag.


Pokemon Go

Strangely, Pokemon Go is Pokemon themed.  Duh.

You catch the Pokemonsters, you evolve them into better monsters and fight with them.

There's 3 factions, but the story for all of them and why they are fighting hasn't been made clear.  That will almost certainly be some new content that Niantic pushes in future updates.

This game centers around the monsters.   Catching them gives you experience to level up and something to fight with.  You can catch monsters nearly anywhere, but in my 4 days of experience they are much more common around PokeStops.

PokeStop?  Are you just making up words now?

No of course not.  Pokemon does though.  PokeStops are in the same spots and Ingress portals, although there are more Portals than PokeStops.   At a PokeStop, you highlight the stop Icon, a picture of the stop expands and you can 'spin' it and it drops some gear.  You need to spin the PokeStops because they release PokeBalls, which you throw at the PokeMonsters to catch them.

A special PokeStop is a gym.  You can deploy monsters in the gym to hold it, you can fight the monsters holding it to claim it for your faction.  Holding a gym gets you better gear.

The Conceptual Differences so far

Ingress is much more team oriented then Pokemon Go.   First off, there's an actual scoring system for the factions.  

That's not to say the PG is without team-work.  Gyms require many PokeTrainers to realistically hold them and start getting the good loot (there's a similar mechanic in Ingress).

PG is much more walking oriented than Ingress.  In Ingress the destination is important, and to really score points for your team you need to make big triangles.  Big triangles require driving.  Destinations are really important in PG too, but there's game mechanics that reward walking too.  So Ingress lends itself better to Sunday drives, and PG works better with strolls through the park.

Ridiculous Criticisms

On a radio show I once heard an interviewee describe something as a beer and tacos argument.  You are asking me to choose between beer and tacos when both are delicious.

The Driving vs. Walking thing  

Driving in Ingress is only important if you want to score points for your team.  Sure that's the point of the game, but is that the point of your game?  It's capture the flag, like mankind's 3rd game ever invented.  There's a lot of sub-goals in the game that can have absolutely nothing to do with driving.

You can also do quite a bit in Pokemon Go sitting on your ass.  Go to a PokeStop with several lures, place them on the PokeStop and spend hours there.

There's no skill involved

Juan I'm looking at you!

In Pokemon you throw balls at the monsters and need to hit them to to catch them.  To catch a portal you just need to press some buttons.  So Pokemon requires skill and Ingress does not?

WRONG!

I've played PG for 4 a whole days now so I've thrown plenty of balls.  And from what I've seen, some monsters catchings are slaves to a random number generator.  You can hit them with a Pokeball right in the beak, with a curve, without a curve or whatever, and they still escape.  

Furthermore, getting adequately proficient at the throwing of the balls takes about 15 minutes.  An hour if you're working on a curve.

Granted I haven't fought in gyms much.  But I would be really surprised if they were anymore challenging then Glyph Hacking in Ingress.

Segue to Ingress.

When you attack a portal, a ring contracts from about half an inch to nothingness.  You keep your finger on the touch screen to fire the weapon; the closer you get to the nothingness without having ring completely disappear  gives you a damage bonus, capped at 20%.  There is skill at timing the release.

Glpyh hacking.  When you hack a portal you can hold down the hacking button to unlock the 'glyph hack' option.   The game will then flash a series of 1 to 5 symbols that you have to "Simon" back.

You have less than 20 seconds to complete all the Glyphs.  Glyph hacking is worth it because you get better gear.  Gear is pretty important.  Anyways, I challenge you to get these two glyphs right the first time you see them.

Final thoughts for now?

So I've seen a lot of Ingress players bash PG for...reasons.   In someways I can understand it, you like your game and everyone else should too and not move onto the next Flavor of the Month.

And I've seen a lot of non-players bash PG(and by extension Ingress) for various other reasons.  The most common is people getting too engrossed in PG that they don't pay attention to their surroundings.  My rebuttal for that is, can't you say that about smart phones and their apps in general?  Getting immersed in your smart phone while walking or driving is a real problem and it shouldn't take a game to make people aware of the public safety hazard.

And some of it is just the inevitable push back on this summer's trendy activity.  PG got really huge really quick and that will cause resentment to people who have to see the countless social media updates and barely funny memes.

So immersion hazards aside (which in my opinion is more of a smart phone issue than a augmented reality game issue), who do these games really hurt?   Non-players take a deep breath, and realize you won't be bombarded with your friends updates and memes by October.

 

F@#$ A Keyflower experimental strategy breakdown

A Keyflower breakdown, focusing on a failed game.

If you want a refresher on the mechanics go here

Part One:  Background (or how the hell did I get myself in such a hole that an experiment seemed like a good idea)

Simply put, I had an epically bad Spring round.  My opening tactic was getting cheap tiles.  I wanted at least two, hoped for three, and came away with one.  This unfocused opening could've been fine, but I needed to update my definition of 'cheap' to a two meeple bid.  I got cut twice and accomplished nearly nothing that round.  A one tile spring round can be fine, but that tile better be awesome.

Through Summer and Fall, I continued to take good value moves, entering winter with an upgraded trade one meeple for three more meeples tile, and a stable full of green guys.  I was absolutely not going to win, Mike already had 30+ points points on the board with his stone collector (pending resource movement which is just a problem and one that is difficult to thwart) and Greg had a fantastic tableau that was capable of generating points in multiple ways.  One of those two were going to win, so my choice was play for a respectable 3rd or try something new.

Part two:  The Plan

I started Winter with ~6 yellow, ~ 4 red, 6 green and 1 (ONE!) blue.  

I was going to come out swinging for the Chapel (12 points, no additional actions required) and then spend green guys making generic guys on the tile I owned..  Hoping to...

1. Spike the 1 for 3 meeple trader for the rest of the table.
2. Use the newly acquired dudes to make further VP bids
3. Get the green guy VP counter cheaply.

Of those 3 goals, the only thing accomplished was spike the 1 for 3 trader.

Part three:  Why this idea had merit

Greens are tricky.  Practically speaking greens guys can realistically capture two VP tiles.  In a 5 player game (last night's game) there's 9-14 things to bid on, and in typical play, the first two rounds are bidding on tiles.  If everyone bids all 3 times you can get 3 tiles claimed, but since you have green, there's obviously green meeple makers so opponents either have them or can make them to thwart your bids.  

When faced with a player that has a load of green guys you absolutely have to bid your generics early to get the tiles properly suited.

Spiking your meeple making tile isn't a bad idea.  Early on it's cost effective to play there and in late stages it's a viable option opponent's can use it de-color screw themselves.  Limiting options for the other players is a perfectly acceptable use of your resources.

No one targets the green guy VP tile.  It is always an afterthought.  "Well 1 blue guy for 2 points at this late stage is good value"

Part four:  What went wrong

The plan really really broke down on item #2.

The big problem is that the plan was overall as slow developing as just bidding green guys on tiles.  By the time I was ready to start placing meeple bids, every tile that would have advanced my game was claimed, and claimed in force.

A smaller problem with the plan was the one blue guy.  I could have salvaged something if I had a better color mix, and I tried to remedy that by playing green and yellow guys on various meeple makers (mine and Juan's primarily).  Blues were not forthcoming early in the round.  Which tells me that this plan really counted on good random meeple draws (or a better meeple mix going into winter).

The plan also broke down on #3.

By the time I accepted that Plan Point #2 was was not going to happen, I was already deeply deeply invested into getting the green guy VP counter.

This presented two pretty big problems.

#1 - There are certain VP tiles that it just does not pay to hyper-maximize.   You end up spending so many actions and resources maximizing them that you neglect the rest of the game.  So yippie!  You got 30 points from that tile and 45 total meaning you still lose by 30.   The green guy VP tile and the gold resource tile ARE ABSOLUTELY THE WORST to hyper-maximize on.    Green guy tile because you spend so many resources to get the green guys in the first place and the gold tile because you spend a lot getting gold AND gold is worth VPs end game anyways.

#2 - It's a juicy target.  You stack up all your green guys on your tiles and it becomes worth it to snipe the green guy maker.  This happened and I was upset for a good hot minute before I realized it cost me about 10 points total.  So how the game shook out, I lost by 35 points instead of 25.  BFD.

Part five:  Is this idea worth repeating?

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Maybe.

You have to start the conversion later.  Get your VP bids in, then see if the Green meeple spiking is viable.

You have to accept that 4-8 points for the Green meeple VP counter is a good return.

And you have to have a versatile generic guy mix.  The point is to convert your unplayable green guys into an asset by getting different colors.  It helps to start with 2+ meeples in each generic suit.