Pokemon Gotta Catch-Em-All

Atras wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

Alright, I've got Dhelor, Dominic Knight, and Destrin registered. I assume from here you guys also need to add me, and then if you're going in the wifi stuff you'll be able to see whoever's on.

I feel like I missed out on my chance to collect a TON of Goodjer Friend Codes at PAX. Anyone want to hit me up with their friend code via PM? Mine is on my posts.

Tanglebones wrote:

Bought last night. I'll add my friend code to the spreadsheet when I can.

What is this spreadsheet you speak of? I would like to show you my pokemanz.

Check page one - it's somewhere in the middle

Destrin wrote:

Starting the ball rolling with my friend code for Pokemon White, kicked off a Spreadsheet here:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?...

For people to share etc.

Only just beaten the first gym so I'm a way of having anything to trade or fight with yet but always good to get prepared :)

Atras wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

Alright, I've got Dhelor, Dominic Knight, and Destrin registered. I assume from here you guys also need to add me, and then if you're going in the wifi stuff you'll be able to see whoever's on.

I feel like I missed out on my chance to collect a TON of Goodjer Friend Codes at PAX. Anyone want to hit me up with their friend code via PM? Mine is on my posts.

Tanglebones wrote:

Bought last night. I'll add my friend code to the spreadsheet when I can.

What is this spreadsheet you speak of? I would like to show you my pokemanz.

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?...

Interesting stuff. Huge numbers lol.

I used to worry about covering all the type bases with my team, but after the first generation it got kinda wonky. There are Pokemon with crazy, unusual type combos, those with the ability to learn moves well outside of what you'd expect for them, etc.

It's kind of a shame that there's not a whole lot of room for middle ground in team-building. You've got the well-worn stuff that the competitive people use, but I find terribly boring. On the other hand, the games don't usually throw anything advanced enough at you to require anything unusual (this has gotten better over time, but still). Maybe if there was a casual-serious Pokemon battlers club, or something...

So I thought some people may be interested in my analysis of Pokemon team balancing.

My first question for a balanced team was the following. Looking at only pokemon of a single one of the 17 types, is it possible to have a team of six where no more than three of your pokemon on the team are weak against any single opponent type, and any given opponent type is vulnerable to at least two of your team?*

I suspected that is was impossible, and indeed it is.

I examined all 24,137,569 possible team combinations. 19,225,589 were eliminated during generation for having more than three pokemon susceptible to a single opponent type. The last 4,911,980 team combinations were eliminated for not having two strong pokemon against all of the pokemon types.

Time for some more fiddling.

*Where a pokemon type is defined as having an advantage if it does extra damage (and the opponent doesn't), and/or the opponent does less damage to him (and he does at least normal damage).

Edit: I don't yet weight for degree of advantage, I just record that an advantage exists.

Alrighty, first revision, and this didn't work either.

I'm still only working with the 17 pure types, and I'm still trying to build a team that will be strong against any combination. Now I've changed the maximum weakness/minimum advantage for each category.

For example Normal pokemon are strong against anything, so why bother having something specifically to counter them? Likewise Poison, Flying, Psychic and Dark Pokemon are each only strong against 2-3 types, so I decided to only require 1 pokemon on my team capable with dealing with each of them, instead of two.

On the weakness side I figured that it was ok to have a lot of weaknesses on my team to something that in turn had a lot of weaknesses, since they would be more likely to be vulnerable to the other things on my team. Grass, Ice, Poison, Ground, Bug, Rock, and Steel all had more than 5 weaknesses, so I let 4 things on my team be weak to it.

Final result: Now only 11,793794 teams are removed for having too many weaknesses, but the entire remainder of 12,343,775 teams are still ruled out for not having enough strong pokemon for each possible opponent.

I have four possible choices.
1. Lower standards further.
2. Instead of trying to have a team strong against anything just try to have a the team strengths depend more on the team's weaknesses. For example if no one on the team is weak to rock, why bother having someone strong against it?
3. Tweak the system a bit to weight larger advantages more than slim ones, and see if that changes anything.
4. Add in the 100 types of dual-type pokemon, that's more than 100k times the current sample size!

I'm going to do the second one for now. Mostly because I doubt that the fourth option would affect my pass ratio much. I'll do that once I actually have some valid teams.

What about trying to create a team that only uses dual-types? Seems like it'd be more efficient to run that way anyway. Though stacking a team in that manner may prove rather difficult in practice.
I very intrigued to see what you come up with.

Coming from Platinum, I think the UI is a step in the wrong direction.

I've added my info to The Spreadsheet, and registered all of the friend codes listed there so far (and Atras's).

Alrighty, so I went back to allowing no more than three weak team members to any particular opponent.

I then went through and identified the types that I thought would be pretty common opponents due to their utility: Water, Fight, Ground, Rock, Ghost, Dragon, Steel. Ghost and dragon are each strong against four types and only weak against two, while the others are strong against five or more types. I wanted a minimum of one pokemon on my team strong to each of these guys.

Then after I clear a prospective team for not having more than three weak pokemons I go through each opponent type. If that type was strong against three pokemon on my team I made sure that at least two of the remainder were strong against it. If that type was strong against two pokemon on my team I made sure at least one of the remainder was strong against it. If one or none of my pokemon was weak against it I just required the default amount (zero or one based on whether it was one of the previously mentioned types.)

This did the trick:

24,137,569 teams were examined.
19,225,589 teams were discarded for having too many members weak to a single Pokemon type.
4,801,640 teams were discarded for not having enough members strong against a single Pokemon type.
110,340 valid teams remain.

Tomorrow I'll add in all the dual types, then see how much fiddling I can do with my requirements to get a reasonable number of valid teams left over. From then I'll do one of two things to actually get useful data out of it. First I could implement knowledge of how much of an advantage a matchup is, then ranking the valid teams. Or I'll set it up so that I can specify some of the team (like say I want a Dragon, Steel, and Electric pokemon) and have it give me all the options for filling the remainder of the team.

Edit: Hmm, another option, have it make these filters, then spit out a random matchup from the valid team list. In that spirit, here are some random teams from my current valid lists:
#19467: Electric, Grass, Flying, Dragon, Fight, Steel
#68147: Rock, Ghost, Steel, Dragon, Fight, Water
#95193: Steel, Water, Ground, Grass, Psychic, Flying

I just realized I should sort the valid list after so that I can remove the duplicates.

Try to post again.

Since it looks like most are grabbing white, I'll probably get Black tomorrow.

I've got black. Will post up my info on the spreadsheet when I get home tonight. Went with the Oshawott because no matter what you all say he's freaking adorable.

And the only good water Pokemon in the game.

thejustinbot wrote:

I've got black. Will post up my info on the spreadsheet when I get home tonight. Went with the Oshawott because no matter what you all say he's freaking adorable.

And the only good water Pokemon in the game.

Just don't steal my name for him: LeeHarvey.

Alright, updated my info with my real trainer name and friend code.

I just added my information to the list. I think I have the first 5 badges but need to start playing more.

In case any of you need some motivation to start playing then watch this very passionate rant about how great the Pokemon are.
Warning it is very NSFW
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-XsSo...

I gots my murder mole. Nothing else matters.

oilypenguin wrote:

I gots my murder mole. Nothing else matters.

Murder mole?

ukickmydog wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

I gots my murder mole. Nothing else matters.

Murder mole?

Drillbur.

oilypenguin wrote:

I gots my murder mole. Nothing else matters.

Lucky, I have to head back there. I gave up after trying for a couple hours. Did you happen to catch him at night? I was wondering if my bad luck was because I was trying during the day.

So I was having a heck of a time catching Throh. Paralyzed, beaten to within an inch of his life, and it still takes 4-5 Great Balls.

I read that Throh is much more rare in Black, and Sahk is much more rare in White, so I caught an extra Throh. If anyone wants to trade me my Level 15 JackieChan for a Sahk let me now, if I haven't found one yet I'd be happy to. (No, you can't have my ChuckNorse.)

Edit: After getting ChuckNorse up to lvl 15 I prefer JackieChan's stats, so he's the on I'll be keeping. Neither of them have any hinder or helped stats though, so it's a pretty small spread.

At least read the last one.

Yonder wrote:
ukickmydog wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

I gots my murder mole. Nothing else matters.

Murder mole?

Drillbur.

Ah yes, that thing seems pretty strong. I had already committed myself to Sandile at that point though so I'm just going with that. Just got it evolved into Krookodile and it's pretty similar to the evolved Drillbur and it looks cooler.

tagg wrote:

At least read the last one.

Awesome. I forgot how disturbing Driffloon's Pokedex was.

Seriously, Pokemon is under-rated and awesome. And by under-rated I mean under-appreciated as a family game (as opposed to children's game).

Yonder wrote:
oilypenguin wrote:

I gots my murder mole. Nothing else matters.

Lucky, I have to head back there. I gave up after trying for a couple hours. Did you happen to catch him at night? I was wondering if my bad luck was because I was trying during the day.

I caught mine in the middle of the night. Just walked up to the little animated dirt pile and beat him up and stuffed him in a ball. Don't care much for him though, despite his smile.

ZOMG, I named my Throh JackieChan too!

Just got my 2nd gym badge, and been having awesome luck with Blitzle (Thundrpony) so far. He zaps the sh*t out of most anything.

tagg wrote:

At least read the last one.

Damn. I need to get me a Yamask, that is messed up. Unfortunately I can't stop playing Homefront and reading The Wise Man's Fear.

All of them made me laugh. Sometimes I wonder if this is the Japanese writers or the translators.

I find the Blitzle to be an allstar as well, he's pretty sweet.

Yonder wrote:

I find the Blitzle to be an allstar as well, he's pretty sweet.

I'll give him a shot.

Now, look at this guy:

IMAGE(http://www.acuteaday.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Drillbur.png)

Look how happy he is. Also, his hands are made of steel. That's right. He's like wolverine except he loves it.

Murder mole.

I got mine from a disturbance on the ground in Whispering something cave.

I quit on my Blitzle at level 19. His big electric move had a type advantage and didn't manage to kill in one shot. That's against my rules. Thanks for the seven levels, zebra.

Yay, I have my own little Underminer now. (She is always beneath you, but nothing is beneath her!)

Definitely try to catch it late at night. I put more than 4 hours into that cave during the day and early evening (7-8). Just got it out after ten PM and found one within 5 minutes.

Blind_Evil wrote:

I quit on my Blitzle at level 19. His big electric move had a type advantage and didn't manage to kill in one shot. That's against my rules. Thanks for the seven levels, zebra.

Also, he's ugly and dumb looking. I'm rolling without electric right now - I just use grass against the water types I run into and rock on the occasional flyers.

necroyeti wrote:
Blind_Evil wrote:

I quit on my Blitzle at level 19. His big electric move had a type advantage and didn't manage to kill in one shot. That's against my rules. Thanks for the seven levels, zebra.

Also, he's ugly and dumb looking. I'm rolling without electric right now - I just use grass against the water types I run into and rock on the occasional flyers.

Same here. It kind of sucks. If only there were some kind of iconic electric rat... ah well.

Just grabbed a fire guy on Route 4. Life is easier now. This is the last time I choose the grass starter. Never, ever again.