Gym territory and reputation part five

So you've decided on maintaining a gym territory. This translates into maintaining a bad reputation.

For this you need:

• Persistence
• Visibility
• Friends
• Maintainability

Persistence

The previous posts covered this. You attack enemy gyms and defend your own. You do this even when it's boring like hell, or just give up on those gyms.

Visibility

You need to be out there. If you've decided on a temporal aspect for your territory (in my personal case evenings and nights), you'll naturally be attacking enemy gyms. However, don't forget to get out there from time to time and defend them on-site.

If the gyms you're targetting is close to where you are, be it living, education or work, use that opportunity whenever possible to go on-site and refill a partially attacked gym. By partially I'm referring to a gym that lost a couple of defenders but were succesfully berried for ten minutes. This is especially important when one of the ousted defenders belonged to you. No one likes to see a defending player returning to a berried gym.

From time to time you ought to get to gyms outside of the conditions you've set up for your territory. Be it boss raids or tearing down a gym outside of temporal conditions is you've set those up.

If at all possible try to set the gyms up for your team prior to boss raids. This is especially true if the gyms are considered central for wherever you're playing.

Friends

Maintaining gym territory simply isn't done by a single player. Sure, you might run six accounts pouring cash into each of them, but if you do then you don't need to read this post in the first place.

Three players should be considered a minimum for maintaining territory. Half a dozen is, obviously, preferred. The territory I'm part of keeping up is primarily handled by four players.

Your group of friends should keep up a live means of communicating. A chat is perfect, but don't forget to meet in real life. This is especially true for attacking gyms when they're controlled by enemy teams. Two or three players tear down a gym in no time at all to a fantastically reduced cost in time and resources.

Make your friends into friends in the game as well. Up to ten percent added damage to a berried blissey does wonders for demotivating a defending player.

Players being physically close to the territory are best for being secondary attackers. By that I mean that players needing to spend time to get to the gyms should start attacks and report this over whatever communication channel you use. It's a matter of a few minutes for the secondary attacker to join.

Make sure you've more or less agreed on the conditions set up for the territory.

Maintainability

Potions, revives, berries and time are the deciding factors for handling gyms. Add attackers and defenders into the equation.

You need to dare emptying your bag of items you don't use to capacity. You also need to spin stops and gyms like mad to keep up your item-income. If you're serious about gyms this probably translates into discarding pokeballs in favour of space for potions, revives and berries.

You want to open 20 or as close to 20 gifts every day. They're an important source for max revives and max potions.

Make realistic conditions for the territory. More often than not this translates into adding temporal conditions. If your territory includes a university with lots of active enemy players you're unlikely to be able to hold the gyms during daytime, and conversely if you're a student there as well as your friendly players then make certain daytime is part of your territory.

Don't try to keep a territory larger than the number of maxed out blissey, chansey and snorlax you can place into them. You might get away with two grade A defenders in a gym or two, but your goal should be to have all three in a gym.

Next post on some interesting side effects.