New World Record: 456 Layers!
Love 'em or hate 'em, co-located portals (portals with exactly the same latitude and longitude) let agents execute fielding and linking plans that would otherwise be impossible. Here's a YouTube playlist giving a quick intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gj5KMOOIG2E&list=PLQ2GCHa7ljyOdXKcexLI5TYuIuW1q2-VC
When a couple of co-located portals popped up in Perth, Western Australia, we knew we could use them to crack the world record number of layers in a layered field, using the same method that the Polish ENL attempted over a year ago, when their 173 layers doubled the global ENL MU score (their sitrep (in Polish): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_EkVLT9ygoVtHO5C13Mqgw8mdB9vX5d8N3P173Hh5IE/edit , video about their op: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PZULnB9jhNw )
Our portals were, alas, much closer together than the Polish ones had been, so our layers and fields would be much smaller, and wholly within the metropolitan area. A MAF, not a BAF. Operation KiloMAF was born!
- speed would be the key, since our key portals would be easily accessible and impossible to protect
- One of the anchors was a tripled portal (3 portals with the same lat/lon) and the other a doubled portal. This allows 3 x 2 = 6 triangles per spine portal, if the links are done in the correct order.
- We opted for a thin herringbone (earning 6 layers per spine portal) overlaid by a larger one stretching southeast using as anchors the tripled portal and the tip of the thin herringbone (3 layers per spine portal)
- Backlinks were not in the plan, not encouraged, and the few accidental fields made by stray backlinks were obviously not counted amongst our 456 layers, since they did not cover the innermost area of the plan
Agents spread out across Perth from 5am on Sunday 26 June, 2022, quietly clearing blockers and capturing key portals. Even at that hour, there was ENL activity just 10 minutes from our most critical portal! At 6:30am, we started linking - with softbanks galore installed on our co-located anchors, linking out from them to spine portals gave 24 x 6 = 144 layers, then another 16 x 3 = 48 layers within minutes. In the meantime, other agents linked TO the anchors from other spine portals - possible because of the special Ingress event that weekend allowing 8km links under fields.
The op ended 90 minutes later, with 456 layers on the map, when our tripled portal was taken down by Enlightened burster fire, netting that lucky agent an estimated 430k AP.
Congratulations agents Congrats to agents SSSputnik, SirLaserBeam, SerMochi, SerMandarin, oppolot, octarine, nzcoops, Nevinator, MrsSputnik, LeethalAgent, Grubatron, Grrrunt, ekg and 57Cell.
Full details, including our preparation work and earlier failed attempts are on YouTube (look out for the passcode in the video):
Annotated Intel logs: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d089GUVRr5LSkvBipGIP95_8W9f7M3QL_GR-yIkUmU8/edit
And photos from the op:
Comments
Great use of the allowable game mechanics to break a world record, always thinking one step ahead 57Cell 👍🏻
One adjustment, I started clearing at 4:30AM ish! ;)
Some more pics. (From the southern anchor area).
congratulations! great accomplishment!
Yes!! Post field brunch picture made it into this sitrep. Salted caramel nutella crumpets with bacon on the side.. to cover the sweet and the salty 😍.
Edit: they were delicious.
Good to see the legendary 57cell is still actively playing - congrats
I don't think it counts as a record unless all the fields share two identical anchors though.
So even if I use the perfectly known and often used cobweb technique (anchor rows on two or all three sides of the BAF), you won't see it as a record either? 🤔
Well, then you have a very narrowly focused category and it should be called "record for the number of layers above one link" and not "record for the maxLayers in BAF". 😉
Congratulations, amazing organization and sitrep!
I disagree. The only measuring metric here is the number of layers.