Note: I'm cross-posting this from a Reddit thread I made.
Here is the result of my attempt to answer the question "what is the strongest Pokemon Maison eligible team covering one another's deficiencies, leaving 0 net weaknesses?". Usage: open with Excel 2010+ with PowerPivot / Power View plugins enabled.
Screenshots:
I'd been interested in getting some practice with Excel plugin PowerPivot, knowing it was pretty powerful for raw data crunching, and decided to ditch the boring "total sales" tutorials to try something more fun. A main challenge in the Pokemon games has been the Battle Tower/Subway/Maison, with one part especially well-suited for number crunching being type coverage.
Beldum Laboratories has done a great job allowing people to find the optimum 2-mon synergies for defensive elemental coverage, but if you're to make 3- or 6-mon teams, the potential synergies obviously go beyond these combinations of 2. Obviously the number of potential combinations racks up pretty fast if you're looking at 6-monster teams, but I found 3 to be manageable using this PowerPivot. It's otherwise not exactly as sophisticated as Beldum Laboratories' tool, though I'd think at least as useful in its own right -- finding a good team from scratch, rather than having an idea already and wanting to go from there.
As seen in the above screenshots, currently used measures of team prowess include:
Disclaimer: I didn't have a way to quantify the usefulness of things like move pools, so the results here aren't exactly a full-fledged measure of team quality, especially since the AI can be exploited with debuff+buff strategies, so this is more for fun really. I think Smogon did ratings that took these into account, though not separately from stats/abilities/whatever. I may have missed out on more logic actually -- I've yet to even play X/Y.
Here is the result of my attempt to answer the question "what is the strongest Pokemon Maison eligible team covering one another's deficiencies, leaving 0 net weaknesses?". Usage: open with Excel 2010+ with PowerPivot / Power View plugins enabled.
Screenshots:
- Excel vanilla version for conditional formatting
- Power View version for pretty icons (adjust image path in the last column of the first sheet and refresh first PowerPivot table to make these work).
- Egg group chart showing junctions between egg groups, made using an MDX query with Excel plugin DAX Studio. Not fully updated for XY.
- Dual-type chart showing Pokemon by types, sorted by descending total base stats within each cell. Like above.
I'd been interested in getting some practice with Excel plugin PowerPivot, knowing it was pretty powerful for raw data crunching, and decided to ditch the boring "total sales" tutorials to try something more fun. A main challenge in the Pokemon games has been the Battle Tower/Subway/Maison, with one part especially well-suited for number crunching being type coverage.
Beldum Laboratories has done a great job allowing people to find the optimum 2-mon synergies for defensive elemental coverage, but if you're to make 3- or 6-mon teams, the potential synergies obviously go beyond these combinations of 2. Obviously the number of potential combinations racks up pretty fast if you're looking at 6-monster teams, but I found 3 to be manageable using this PowerPivot. It's otherwise not exactly as sophisticated as Beldum Laboratories' tool, though I'd think at least as useful in its own right -- finding a good team from scratch, rather than having an idea already and wanting to go from there.
As seen in the above screenshots, currently used measures of team prowess include:
- net team weaknesses (filtered out all non-0)
- total base stats (+100 if either can Mega evolve)
- total ability score (a measure taken from one of the online battle simulators, forgot which)
- total weaknesses (neglecting synergies)
- double weaknesses
- resisted elements
- STAB coverage (if each mon has one attack for each of their types, how many single types are they good against together?)
- total mega evolutions (more = more choice)
- total power (power being a custom measure I preferred over total base stats, defined as [highest attack stat] * [HP] * [lowest defense stat] after factoring in IVs and likely EVs, intended as a more useful measure of staying power, to account for the fact not all base stat distributions are equally useful, e.g. Throh with physical-focused offense but split defense vs. Tentacruel with split offense yet special-focused defense).
- total base speed (as this was excluded in the above measure)
Disclaimer: I didn't have a way to quantify the usefulness of things like move pools, so the results here aren't exactly a full-fledged measure of team quality, especially since the AI can be exploited with debuff+buff strategies, so this is more for fun really. I think Smogon did ratings that took these into account, though not separately from stats/abilities/whatever. I may have missed out on more logic actually -- I've yet to even play X/Y.