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Running Backward
My finneon evolved yesterday, and now today the rest of my team evolved, leaving just my skorupi and the gible I've been raising. (I'd been expecting the cranidos, at least, to evolve near L40, not L30...) And yet, the golbat I've been carting around is still not happy enough to evolve.
So now I'm rebuilding, again, almost from scratch, since my gabite's only L25 (at least the snover is L32) and my team now includes a marill just there for surf. Not sure that the final pokemon will be (or what will take the skorupi's place when that evolves, which should be pretty soon)
Meanwhile, the ponyta I dumped at the daycare is L29. I might wind up taking that out and switching it for something that evolves at a lower level, I'm not sure.
I'm probably going to end up compromising and leaving a fully evolved pokemon on the team at this rate.
Anyway: does anyone think it's possible to figure out how to evolve special pokemon in the fourth-gen? Happiness evolutions aren't a big deal, since they'll generally occur by themselves, and any stone evolutions can be figured out by trial and error.
But I think players were hitting the upper edge of what can be reasonably figured out in-game back in the second generation, and even then, I don't think all of the item+trade evolutions were possible to figure out unless you'd played the first generation and so could easily intuit that onix not evolving in the first generation, a steel coat item, and a new steel form, were connected. By the third gen, even assuming you somehow successfully worked out that milotic evolve by beauty, odds are you couldn't get the score high enough on a given feebas to evolve and would probably take the failure as a sign your guess was wrong, rather than that you needed to catch a feebas that liked a certain flavor of pokeblock, then get special berries, etc.
To put this in perspective, in the first game, there were four special pokemon. They all were three-stage. There were in-game comments about the fact trading pokemon made some evolve, and an in-game demonstration where you saw two kids trading and one mentioning that the graveler had evolved by doing so, and later in Yellow you could trade for a machoke that would demonstrate this directly. Other trainer characters would remark about having a pokemon of that kind and how it hadn't evolved, mentioning that maybe there was something else that you needed.
How are you supposed to figure out that, say, combee evolves, but only if it's female, especially given that you'll probably never get a female combee unless you deliberately set out to get one in the first place? Or identify which of the dozen item/trade combinations apply to which of the hundreds of pokemon? I know there's the internet, but it seems like the game is made now with the assumption you'll use internet guides, so they can make things as convoluted and unlikely as possible. The closest we get to hints are things like a girl who trades her haunter with an everstone attached, which seems like it's just to taunt experienced players and work off their assumptions rather than to clue in new players.
So now I'm rebuilding, again, almost from scratch, since my gabite's only L25 (at least the snover is L32) and my team now includes a marill just there for surf. Not sure that the final pokemon will be (or what will take the skorupi's place when that evolves, which should be pretty soon)
Meanwhile, the ponyta I dumped at the daycare is L29. I might wind up taking that out and switching it for something that evolves at a lower level, I'm not sure.
I'm probably going to end up compromising and leaving a fully evolved pokemon on the team at this rate.
Anyway: does anyone think it's possible to figure out how to evolve special pokemon in the fourth-gen? Happiness evolutions aren't a big deal, since they'll generally occur by themselves, and any stone evolutions can be figured out by trial and error.
But I think players were hitting the upper edge of what can be reasonably figured out in-game back in the second generation, and even then, I don't think all of the item+trade evolutions were possible to figure out unless you'd played the first generation and so could easily intuit that onix not evolving in the first generation, a steel coat item, and a new steel form, were connected. By the third gen, even assuming you somehow successfully worked out that milotic evolve by beauty, odds are you couldn't get the score high enough on a given feebas to evolve and would probably take the failure as a sign your guess was wrong, rather than that you needed to catch a feebas that liked a certain flavor of pokeblock, then get special berries, etc.
To put this in perspective, in the first game, there were four special pokemon. They all were three-stage. There were in-game comments about the fact trading pokemon made some evolve, and an in-game demonstration where you saw two kids trading and one mentioning that the graveler had evolved by doing so, and later in Yellow you could trade for a machoke that would demonstrate this directly. Other trainer characters would remark about having a pokemon of that kind and how it hadn't evolved, mentioning that maybe there was something else that you needed.
How are you supposed to figure out that, say, combee evolves, but only if it's female, especially given that you'll probably never get a female combee unless you deliberately set out to get one in the first place? Or identify which of the dozen item/trade combinations apply to which of the hundreds of pokemon? I know there's the internet, but it seems like the game is made now with the assumption you'll use internet guides, so they can make things as convoluted and unlikely as possible. The closest we get to hints are things like a girl who trades her haunter with an everstone attached, which seems like it's just to taunt experienced players and work off their assumptions rather than to clue in new players.
no subject
That is, unless you've kept your starter or something.
Oh, and there's also the question as to why you're switching out so much (I'm guessing that it's FOR SCIENCE?).
no subject
As to why, it's so I can raise and evolve as many pokemon as possible. It's an okay tactic most of the game but starts to really kill you near the end. Along the same lines, I played through Pokemon XD purifying pokemon only through battles, dropping them off my team once they were purified (even if I didn't have any new shadow pokemon), and using them in order of capture, so pretty soon I had enough of a backlog that I was fighting pokemon ten levels above me.
People who think pokemon games aren't challenging don't give enough credit to people who are willing to idiotically hobble themselves for no real reason.
no subject
It's probably a LITTLE more doable in XD because (IIRC) they throw some stellar 'mons at you later in the game (though just catching them is probably a headache), but in a standard game... yikes. Especially given how the games have that nasty tendency of suddenly jacking up the difficulty the second you get to the Elite 4/5/6/etc.
... speaking of which, how ARE you going to deal with the Elites? Are you just going to keep using whatever monsters you have on hand, or are you going to slap together a group from your favorites (such as they are)?
no subject
With the elite, I assemble a mix of whatever legendary is accessible with a balanced team out of the highest level pokemon I raised.
Then I lose a lot for the next five hours, spend all my money on healing items, somehow manage to get through the elite four and finally win by a hair.
Since I'm hitting that point in the game now, at the seventh gym, I'm probably going to have start seriously raising a team about now. (I've burned through about thirty revives already.)