The 30th anniversary of Pokémon begins! It's been 30 years since the release of "Pokémon Red and Green." Pokémon will celebrate its 30th anniversary on Friday, February 27, 2026. This year is going to be the best year yet! Stay tuned!
#Pokémon30thAnniversary
My general problem with Pokémon (at least the older versions, haven't played the latest) is that when playing against others it frequently just boils down to the same set of legendary and overpowered mons.
You sort of addressed this running the milp without certain mons as options, which makes sense.
But you already have the machinery for a better constraint: max total base stat. You could think of it as "weight classes" in box.
So, for a given weight class, your team can only add up to Y in total base stat. You can squeeze one of the OP mons, but then the rest are slackers. Or you could balance them.
It makes it a lot more interesting and invites for diversity. And you could run it for many different values of Y.
Follow up thought: it would be cool if you imagine a match to consist of three sets each for a different class.
So each player comes with three teams of small, mid and large base stat classes. You can't repeat monster across teams. Whoever wins 2/3 wins the match.
...
And if this was my college house, we would have a price system for the mons so you wouldn't be able to repeat mons even between players. But that's a different thing altogether.
However, like with many of these obscure features, I am not so sure it works well in practice. I have the Windows 11 laptop I'm viewing that SVG from set with support enabled for english, french and russian, and I'm getting, among most of the English tags, a few stray "Psychique" and "Привидение" types in the svg. I have no idea how it chooses which one to show, there.
If you find the base game too easy, I can recommend the IronMON challenge: You can only use one mon, permadeath, stats are randomized, all trainer levels are buffed by 1.5x and you can't level up on wilds. Along with numerous other rules to make it harder. There are variants that are borderline impossible to beat, like Super Kaizo IronMON. Out of hundreds of thousands of attempts, it has only been beaten once. Would make for an interesting optimization problem.
Base stat total alone is a bad metric, because stat distribution is equally as important.
If the stats are distributed heavily both on attack and special attack, it's usually bad because you generally want specialist attackers and these stats could be better somewhere else like speed.
Absolutely! In general I would expect a better model to incorporate a lot of weighed terms in the objective to choose less "extreme" solutions, but here I was mostly interested in illustrating the method.
Great article but I’d say you’re optimizing for the wrong metric here. For in game playthroughs, offense > defense and especially speedy offense beats anything else.
I’d state it as, Given any type, we should be able to hit it for super-effective damage with at least 1 move. And instead of taking raw BST, I’d take Max(SPD+ATK, SPD+SPA) to favour speedy offense.
Of course this does not take into question the thorny question of availability. Metagross is a top tier but only available post game in its debut. On the other hand Crobat and Gyarados are readily available in many of the games early on and evolve fairly quickly.
Please look into the competitive Nuzlocke community, there are a lot of damage calculations and viability spreadsheets all around, you’ll find it interesting.
Thank you for your suggestion, I agree with you (and another commenter) that base stat is not that useful, and availability is actually what I would prioritise on in a next iteration. I tried to keep it simple here, mostly because it was interesting enough as an analysis. But if I were to redo this to get _the best_ team in a generation, I'd definitely go with what you suggested!
I'm curious how it would rank existing teams–for example, are there trainers who pick better teams (of course, I am sure the bug catchers get soundly trounced). Surely Cynthia or Red have a strong team?
Haha, I started reading this, got interrupted, came back and got confused by the graph. Then came to the comments, saw your comment, reloaded the post and voila!
I do comment on that in the article, I think it's a nice example of how your model can only know what you tell it (the one I used in the article doesn't know about abilities).
this was a great read to start the new year! having worked extensively with mixed integer programs, it is always a bit disheartening to see them not used enough for everyday decision-making. one of my goals this year is to create a layer to make it easier to formulate mips and test them, via plain text input. this would hopefully increase adoption through a lower barrier to entry.
Lots of people working in IT have tattoos, I like to see what theme/image overlap they have.
Three people in my current workplace have a balloon tattoo (interestingly all of them are red balloons). Five people in my current workplace have a Pokémon tattoo that is easily visible.
Edit: Including myself, on both counts, I should have said.
A tattoo of a balloon! Unless you meant what the meaning of the design was, and in that case different people have different associations and meanings.
One of my forearms is covered in things my son used to be obsessed by when he was young, which is why I have a lego figure, a pikachu, and a red balloon as depicted in the book "Goodnight Moon" which I read to him every night for 3+ years.
I was planning in a future sequel/update to do this but with "better" constraints like only including Pokémon available in a game, etc... Maybe even separate it into early/mid/late-game availability since most optimal Pokémon are late-game anyway.
Translated text:
The 30th anniversary of Pokémon begins! It's been 30 years since the release of "Pokémon Red and Green." Pokémon will celebrate its 30th anniversary on Friday, February 27, 2026. This year is going to be the best year yet! Stay tuned! #Pokémon30thAnniversary
My general problem with Pokémon (at least the older versions, haven't played the latest) is that when playing against others it frequently just boils down to the same set of legendary and overpowered mons.
You sort of addressed this running the milp without certain mons as options, which makes sense.
But you already have the machinery for a better constraint: max total base stat. You could think of it as "weight classes" in box.
So, for a given weight class, your team can only add up to Y in total base stat. You can squeeze one of the OP mons, but then the rest are slackers. Or you could balance them.
It makes it a lot more interesting and invites for diversity. And you could run it for many different values of Y.
For the mainline games it usually does not matter. You can beat it with any single Pokémon pretty much.
So each player comes with three teams of small, mid and large base stat classes. You can't repeat monster across teams. Whoever wins 2/3 wins the match.
...
And if this was my college house, we would have a price system for the mons so you wouldn't be able to repeat mons even between players. But that's a different thing altogether.
The type labels will be displayed in the language your browser is set to. I didn't even know this was possible.
[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/97/Pokemon_...
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...
However, like with many of these obscure features, I am not so sure it works well in practice. I have the Windows 11 laptop I'm viewing that SVG from set with support enabled for english, french and russian, and I'm getting, among most of the English tags, a few stray "Psychique" and "Привидение" types in the svg. I have no idea how it chooses which one to show, there.
https://github.com/PyroMikeGit/SuperKaizoIronMON
If the stats are distributed heavily both on attack and special attack, it's usually bad because you generally want specialist attackers and these stats could be better somewhere else like speed.
I’d state it as, Given any type, we should be able to hit it for super-effective damage with at least 1 move. And instead of taking raw BST, I’d take Max(SPD+ATK, SPD+SPA) to favour speedy offense.
Of course this does not take into question the thorny question of availability. Metagross is a top tier but only available post game in its debut. On the other hand Crobat and Gyarados are readily available in many of the games early on and evolve fairly quickly.
Please look into the competitive Nuzlocke community, there are a lot of damage calculations and viability spreadsheets all around, you’ll find it interesting.
Thank you for a lovely post!
Three people in my current workplace have a balloon tattoo (interestingly all of them are red balloons). Five people in my current workplace have a Pokémon tattoo that is easily visible.
Edit: Including myself, on both counts, I should have said.
What does it mean?
One of my forearms is covered in things my son used to be obsessed by when he was young, which is why I have a lego figure, a pikachu, and a red balloon as depicted in the book "Goodnight Moon" which I read to him every night for 3+ years.
> Mewtwo (#151)
Should be 150