Pokemon Gotta Catch-Em-All

Thanks. It'll take a few minutes, I need to break my wireless security before I can get on.

I wanted to get one before I did the end-game. I'm oddly particular about strange things in Pokemon, thanks for indulging me.

Thanks again. I was worried with that disconnect <,<

Wireless router seems to be acting up tonight. Got it done though at least! Good luck finding one on the GTS.

EDIT: Oho, the season finally changed to Winter. Now I can get to some of those pesky items in Twist Mountain that were inaccessible.

That's because it's April 1st. Every real time month the seasons change, starting with Spring in January.

Yonder wrote:

That's because it's April 1st. Every real time month the seasons change, starting with Spring in January.

Yeah, I know. I just hadn't been keeping track of the date.

Someone posted earlier about the GTS being bogged down with people asking for ridiculous returns, and now that I'm getting into it I see that it's indeed worse than it was when I last got into it in Pearl. 90% of people are looking for level 9 or below Zekrom/Reshiram, which you can't even get normally. I can't figure out why they'd even do this. My only theory is that it's like this MMO I used to play. When one of the guilds would get a big kill and the best drop off that big kill, they'd have the winner of the item post it on the auction house for 9,999,999,999. To show off.

But what's impressive about a level 56 Reshiram? I just don't get it.

dhelor wrote:

EDIT: Oho, the season finally changed to Winter. Now I can get to some of those pesky items in Twist Mountain that were inaccessible.

That's one of those examples of Pokemon games being more innovative than I want them to be. It's neat, but gets annoying at times.

I'm really thinking about picking this up. I've been doing most of my handheld gaming with the IPod Touch but it has yet to produce a Pokemon clone. The only Pokemon game I have ever played was Pearl and I enjoyed it but stopped at the elite four because I got distracted by other games. My question is what's the appeal of the game once you beat the elite four? Does the goal turn into filling out your pokedex? Is it possible to catch all of the current generation's Pokemon without having to trade? I guess my main concern, is there fun to be had without having anyone else you know playing the game?

There's a series of postgame bosses, some legendaries to catch, two or three new towns, new routes, and a former champion to battle. Probably 20ish hours? I haven't done it all so I can't say yet.

I played the first three generations alone and they were all still lots of fun. With the magic of the Internet, we've had a nice little trade community here.

You can't get all 155 of the new pokemon from one version. That doesn't really mean much, though. If you can't trade with us online, just look up the version exclusives and pick the game that has the ones you like most.

I've got a couple Throhs now (one in mid teens, other level 31), and looking to trade for a Sawk, if anyone is around this evening.
I also have a couple more Zoruas floating around.

Edit: I also got a female Larvesta, so if anyone wants some babies, let me know. I'll churn out a few eggs right now.

Think I might wait for pokemon gray.

Baron Of Hell wrote:

Think I might wait for pokemon gray.

They've already got a Pokemon Gray.

I have not yet started breeding my Tirtuoga, but I now have Archens, Tynamos, Emolgas, and Axews for anyone that wants them.

I should have Pokemon Black in from Amazon this week, so I'll join you all shortly. The 3DS is the first DS system I have owned. Is there any reason for me to pick up the older DS Pokemon games, or should I just stick to black?

Play through the main story in Black, see if you like it. If so, you may want to look into getting a copy of Diamond or Pearl, and Heartgold or Soulsilver. It really depends how much you want out of it. If you get into collecting Pokemon, or just want a bigger variety from which to build your teams, you'll need both of the older generations.

Blind_Evil wrote:

If you get into collecting Pokemon, or just want a bigger variety from which to build your teams, you'll need both of the older generations.

And probably one of the GBA versions as well. I know there's a few I've ended up having to hunt down in Sapphire because they're nowhere to be found in Pearl or Soul Silver.

Not that I'm trying to be a pokenabler or anything.

dhelor wrote:
Baron Of Hell wrote:

Think I might wait for pokemon gray.

They've already got a Pokemon Gray.

It took me a bit to get that.

icwutudidthar

Yonder wrote:

I have not yet started breeding my Tirtuoga, but I now have Archens, Tynamos, Emolgas, and Axews for anyone that wants them.

I'll be around this evening if you are interested in trading a Tynamos for a Larvesta, or something else, though I don't think I have anything you don't at this point.

Yeah, I'm basically giving them away. If I get something I don't have yet that's just a bonus.

dhelor wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

If you get into collecting Pokemon, or just want a bigger variety from which to build your teams, you'll need both of the older generations.

And probably one of the GBA versions as well. I know there's a few I've ended up having to hunt down in Sapphire because they're nowhere to be found in Pearl or Soul Silver.

Not that I'm trying to be a pokenabler or anything.

He's using a 3DS, no GBA slot.

Blind_Evil wrote:
dhelor wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

If you get into collecting Pokemon, or just want a bigger variety from which to build your teams, you'll need both of the older generations.

And probably one of the GBA versions as well. I know there's a few I've ended up having to hunt down in Sapphire because they're nowhere to be found in Pearl or Soul Silver.

Not that I'm trying to be a pokenabler or anything.

He's using a 3DS, no GBA slot. :(

Yeah, that is a bit of a bummer. I hope they plan to release some of the good GBA titles on the e-shop eventually.

Filling out the pokedex is tedious work, but hey, I'm up to 611 now. Not too much further.

In my first game of pokemon I tried to get a balanced team and use it for the whole game, but I ended up just using Charizard for everything until he was such a high level that he could take out the Final Four himself.

This time around I am switching around my team after every gym leader, tailoring it for the pokemon type of the next leader. It's a huge amount of overkill, since you generally only need to use one or two strong pokemon to get through a gym, not four. It's also slown me down quite a bit, because there is a little bit more grinding that has to be done to prepare you. For example right now I just beat the ice gym, and swapped out for several level 20 guys to fight against dragons. The average level in the area is 35, so I'll have to grind a bit before I'm ready to go.

Over all I like it a lot though. It really adds more variety as I'm constantly using new pokemon that I otherwise wouldn't.

Well, got to 644 and now I'm stuck, as the last couple I could get require evolutionary stones which I don't have. Grr. So while I walk around in the Giant Chasm cave trying to find swirling dust spots, I'm leveling up a bunch of Rotom in their various forms to do an all Rotom Elite four run. Should be interesting, not sure how viable the team will be, but given a high enough level it should be too bad.

I'm about to assemble my final team. I definitely think that I'll go with Scrafty, Chandelure, Seismitoad, and Escavalier. The last two are still up in the air. I'm leaning towards Archeops, Sigilyph, Galvantula, and Stunfisk.

I was thinking Sigilyph and Galvantula, but that leaves me doubled up on Bugs. Maybe I would switch Escavalier for Ferrothorn?

Ferro and Escavalier are essentially the same as far as the single player business goes, I think. Lots of resistances, double weak to fire, good-enough attack stats, slow as hell. I don't think you can go wrong with either, really. I went without a psychic and just taught it to Chandelure, IIRC.

If you use Chandelure, Archeops, and Escavalier we'd have 3 of the same. I guess that's to be expected with only 155 or however many accessible through the initial campaign.

Personally, my adventures have taken me to finishing SoulSilver. I took about 5 days to breed, build, and level myself a beastly team (in Pearl) to rip through SS, while also gathering more team-building material for B/W.

I'm on a mission to finish a certain book though, so the going has been slow.

Blind_Evil wrote:

If you use Chandelure, Archeops, and Escavalier we'd have 3 of the same. I guess that's to be expected with only 155 or however many accessible through the initial campaign.

Yeah, and I believe we are both avoiding legendary pokemon, which drastically shrinks the pool of dual-typed pokemon.

As far as Archeops goes, there are only three (non-legendary) dual-typed Rocks in the games. I don't care for Crustle, and while I like Carracosta I really like Seismitoad, which makes him a little redundant, so if I do have a rock pokemon Archeops is the clear choice.

There are only two dual-typed fire pokemon, Chandelure and Volcarona, and while I like Volcarona (apparently I have a thing for the bug pokemon) he's being set against Galvantula and Escavalier and being found a little wanting.

Yeah, I dunno yet, I'll need some more time to think.

Yonder wrote:

There are only two dual-typed fire pokemon

*cough*

Oh thanks! I didn't realize he picked up a second type in the last evolution.

Hmm, I do like my Srafty though, we'll have to see.

Global link is going live April 13th.

So I had been putting off work on my TeamBuilder since I was designing a new team specific to each gym. Now I have all my badges though and have been trying to build an all-star well-balanced team and was interested in what the number cruncher would say about it.

First I listed out all 43 non-legendary types of pokemon in Black and White. The program takes way, way longer the more possible pokemon types there are to look at, so I filtered out the bottom 20 types by strength/weakness ratio. This included all single-type pokemon. (And PsychicFlying, so I'm definitely rethinking Sigilyph, all of my other contenders made the cut with room to spare.)

I then started the actual calculations against all 54 opponent types in Black and White. (I could have refined this still further, since I know I won't be fighting a lot of those, like Victini, and my dragon, a lot of the others are solo fights that won't be very hard, but whatever.)

I started a long, dry explanation of exactly how I was determining team values, and when, where and how, I was removing weak teams but I luckily realized that was super boring so I won't subject anyone to that. Here are the results:

148035889 teams were examined.
142017429 teams were discarded for having too many members weak to a single Pokemon type.
81360 teams were discarded for not having enough members strong against a single Pokemon type.
5926562 teams were discarded as duplicates of a team that was already added.
10538 valid teams remain.

And the top ten pokemon teams:

DarkFight, ElectricFlying, GrassSteel, WaterFlying, GhostFire, GroundSteel
ElectricFlying, GrassSteel, WaterFlying, GhostFire, BugSteel, GroundSteel
GrassSteel, WaterGround, WaterFlying, WaterFlying, GhostFire, BugSteel, GroundSteel
DarkFlying, GrassSteel, WaterGround, WaterFlying, GhostFire, GroundSteel
DarkFight, ElectricFlying, WaterGhost, WaterFlying, GhostFire, GroundSteel
DarkFight, GrassSteel, WaterFlying, GhostFire, RockFlying, GroundSteel
ElectricFlying, WaterGhost, WaterFlying, GhostFire, BugSteel, GroundSteel
ElectricGround, GrassSteel, WaterFlying, WaterFlying, GhostFire, GroundSteel
ElectricGround, WaterFlying, WaterFlying, GhostFire, BugSteel, GroundSteel

So yeah... That's not right... Look at all those duplicates. Not only are there several times when there are single type overlaps (which I expected, especially with Steel, as it has a lot of useful resistances, if there were more dual-typed Dragons available we'd probably see the same thing), but there are a lot of exact duplicates in the top ten, notably with WaterFlying. I went through quite a bit of trouble expressly allowing duplicates, partly because I thought they may be ranked high like this, and I wanted an easy indication that the weighting wasn't working like I wanted. The duplicates also show another problem also seen by the frequent addition of GrassSteel and BugSteel in the same team. While I expressly allowed two "very weak" types on a team, I was hoping that it would be weighted a little lower.

There are a couple things that I am going to change and see how the rankings are affected. First of all I don't think my criteria for filtering out teams that don't have strong team mates covering all the teams weaknesses better. (That's the 81360 removed above, I want that number to be a lot higher, especially since that happens before the duplicates are removed).

In the calculations I also ignore the fact that pokemon have attacks outside of their type. A ground pokemon isn't actually invincible against electric. The lightning rat will just use quick attack or something (albeit at 66% power because you get a 50% bonus if the attack matches your type.) Heck, you could even be vulnerable to whatever secondary attack he uses.

I'll ignore that last part for now, and just cap enemy attacks at two thirds. This will devalue resistances a lot, and hopefully make the weaknesses rule the calculations a bit more. This does concern me a bit though, because a type with a lot of resistances will get penalized. I'm not covering the fact that there are high odds that the opponents other attacks have resistances as well. If this version doesn't get good results I can try something else.