Town gaming

I'm spending a few days in a town visiting relatives. It's an interesting experience. In ways it's harder to play here compared to my experience from a rural village -- virtually no resources at all only forces you to a minimum of playing in the first place, which while boring isn't difficult.

Now, however, I'm in a 30k population town, which is a far cry from the 650k population city I'm used to.

30k is enough to merit a decent number of gyms and stops, but the experience is extremely different. Spawn to stop/gym ratio is entirely different, which plays havoc with my poke-balls. Ie the number of poke-balls I have available is falling like a brick from an aeroplane.

Obviously the same would be true for potions and revives in the long run, but the friends system together with field researches make his less of a problem. Add that the locals playing here have nothing comparable to place into gyms or attack gyms with.

Bringing a healthy number of golden razzberries into this town further skews the balance, but in the end I'd run out of those as well as the low availability of level five raids prevents me from bulking up on resources.

All in all gym battling is a very different experience here from what I'm used to. To a certain degree you could argue that it's akin to playing a different game.

Well, that's all for this time.

About myself

The last post I wrote on why I believe I have something to contribute to the community was written in December 2016 or so. The level 35 part carried a little more weight at that time.

Since then the game has veered into four directions, one of which is the common denominator for the other three -- grinding.

• Just shy of 130k mons caught
• 9k walked
• 110+ k spun stops
• below 1k total raids

I guess that still places me at the lower end of hard core players.

PvP

Total newb. Nuff said.

Boss raiding

Just for grinding. If you want to know the best method and circumstances for handling that boss with a minimum number of players, go ask someone else.

Gym battles

I belong to the heavy weights here. Boasting? Probably, but most likely also a reality.

While I can only muster a paltry 23 gold badges, that's not the way I game. I play the territorial game, and if I wanted to mass produce more badges I'd simply dump another $ 1k into the game and chew up every soloable raid within distance provided I didn't have gold on that gym. In other words, gym badges say very little about gym battling.

• 9.5k ace trainer (including a couple of dozen PvP trainer battles)
• 48k battles won
• 50k berries fed into gyms
• 38k hours in gyms

There are several players with higher numbers, but it still constitutes as heavy weight.

I very seldom do rural gyms. Being allowed to spend a full day in any defended gym is an exception. My most active gym tells a story in itself

• 6.8k victories
• 119 days defended
• 5.6k berries fed into the gym

Main combat area

My personal territory isn't a suburb. It's the main cluster of gyms in my 650k population city, and as such is heavily contested. That's also what makes it fun. It's five gyms in a cluster plus another two within one and two minute's walk from said cluster.

As I don't have infinite time to clear it out when needed, I want all seven gyms to be flipped within an hour when I go solo, they're fully populated but not defended. That's under ten minutes per gym, walking included, and I catch mons on the way.

Any one gym defended by no more than two berry feeders should be soloable. It's my responsibility to keep a line-up and the associated resources neded to enable that. I do.

It's my responsibility to be able to place the best possible, maxed out defender into a gym disregarding what it already contains. Barring a seventh maxed out blissey I fill that condition.

Five maxed out snorlax accompanied by four maxed out chansey handle the majority of the other cases, and I have access to another four top-class maxed out tertiary defenders against whom fighting attacks are ineffective as well as another dozen maxed out tertiary defenders to handle corner case scenarios.

How I play

Needless to say my attackers are all maxed out. I assemble an attacking team from two dozen attackers while walking to the next gym. I have yet to see a defensive line-up against which I can't:

• field two super effective attackers against each defender
• or
• down the crap in the gym before it inflicts meaningful damage on my attacker

It's my responsibility to know what defender goes into a gym and how to remove opposing defenders as efficiently as possible. I do.

To date I have never failed to bring down a gym solo when I set my mind to it. That includes burning down a gym defended by four players, admittedly four very drunk defenders, but they were still on-site.

I prefer the gym raiding style. That means two or more players acting in tandem. We're running a dedicated gym battle chat with some fifty members. Of those two dozen are extremely active. Occasionally we organise larger raids. The largest one saw 150 gyms flipped during a two hour assault and all those gyms defended for another two for shits and giggles.

All in all I'm a major PITA for valor and mystic whenever I take a personal interest in a gym. I'm a gym raider through and through, and that's pretty much it about myself.

Gym territory and reputation part five

So you've decided on maintaining a gym territory. This translates into maintaining a bad reputation.

For this you need:

• Persistence
• Visibility
• Friends
• Maintainability

Persistence

The previous posts covered this. You attack enemy gyms and defend your own. You do this even when it's boring like hell, or just give up on those gyms.

Visibility

You need to be out there. If you've decided on a temporal aspect for your territory (in my personal case evenings and nights), you'll naturally be attacking enemy gyms. However, don't forget to get out there from time to time and defend them on-site.

If the gyms you're targetting is close to where you are, be it living, education or work, use that opportunity whenever possible to go on-site and refill a partially attacked gym. By partially I'm referring to a gym that lost a couple of defenders but were succesfully berried for ten minutes. This is especially important when one of the ousted defenders belonged to you. No one likes to see a defending player returning to a berried gym.

From time to time you ought to get to gyms outside of the conditions you've set up for your territory. Be it boss raids or tearing down a gym outside of temporal conditions is you've set those up.

If at all possible try to set the gyms up for your team prior to boss raids. This is especially true if the gyms are considered central for wherever you're playing.

Friends

Maintaining gym territory simply isn't done by a single player. Sure, you might run six accounts pouring cash into each of them, but if you do then you don't need to read this post in the first place.

Three players should be considered a minimum for maintaining territory. Half a dozen is, obviously, preferred. The territory I'm part of keeping up is primarily handled by four players.

Your group of friends should keep up a live means of communicating. A chat is perfect, but don't forget to meet in real life. This is especially true for attacking gyms when they're controlled by enemy teams. Two or three players tear down a gym in no time at all to a fantastically reduced cost in time and resources.

Make your friends into friends in the game as well. Up to ten percent added damage to a berried blissey does wonders for demotivating a defending player.

Players being physically close to the territory are best for being secondary attackers. By that I mean that players needing to spend time to get to the gyms should start attacks and report this over whatever communication channel you use. It's a matter of a few minutes for the secondary attacker to join.

Make sure you've more or less agreed on the conditions set up for the territory.

Maintainability

Potions, revives, berries and time are the deciding factors for handling gyms. Add attackers and defenders into the equation.

You need to dare emptying your bag of items you don't use to capacity. You also need to spin stops and gyms like mad to keep up your item-income. If you're serious about gyms this probably translates into discarding pokeballs in favour of space for potions, revives and berries.

You want to open 20 or as close to 20 gifts every day. They're an important source for max revives and max potions.

Make realistic conditions for the territory. More often than not this translates into adding temporal conditions. If your territory includes a university with lots of active enemy players you're unlikely to be able to hold the gyms during daytime, and conversely if you're a student there as well as your friendly players then make certain daytime is part of your territory.

Don't try to keep a territory larger than the number of maxed out blissey, chansey and snorlax you can place into them. You might get away with two grade A defenders in a gym or two, but your goal should be to have all three in a gym.

Next post on some interesting side effects.

Gym territory and reputation part three

So, how to build that reputation.

Attacking

The first half basically requires you to spin gyms and stops as well as opening presents like mad. Cause you're out there tearing down enemy gyms, and it's going to cost you lots and lots of potions and revives.

It doesn't have to be 24/7, but there needs to be a system to it. Like, for example, you're attacking between 6 pm and 9 pm.

Worst case you'll be seeing an absurd amount of golden razz berries fed into the gyms you're targetting. Doesn't matter. Either they go down or you're not building that reputation.

This is why you don't want to do this alone. Two attackers cut the time and resources needed to one third of what's required of a solo attacker.


Now, most would argue that attacking gyms on a schedule makes you predictable and easier to launch berries against. That's absolutely correct. This is not about a suprise assault on one or more gyms. This is all about establishing a reputation. Predictable is good as long as the end result invariably is that the gyms go down.

You want the experience I have with my seven closest gyms. I attack during day time and I can expect a lot of berries thrown after me. I attack evenings and most defenders will simply yield the gym even if said defenders did indeed throw a few golden razz berries into the gym. Because if it's evening those gyms are going down. End of story.


Atacking gyms is also a matter of presence. Preferably you live close to the gyms you're interested in. If one of them gets miscoloured when it's supposed to belong to your team, then you go out there and rectify the error.


Last, attacking gyms does contain a certain amount of realism. If you're unable to control them 24/7, then don't even try. Just establish a schedule when they're going down and allow enemy teams to control them off hours, according to your definition of off hours.

Next post on defence.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, raiding

I won't go into how you hulk into a gym on your own. That has been covered in detail before and isn't really part of gym raiding.

For a raid you'd expect to be

• 2
• 3 - 4
• 5 -6

players attacking more than one gym during one raiding session.

The two player attack is basically more or less the same as going alone with the main difference that the time needed to down a gym is cut in half and the cost in potions and revives cut to between a third to 40% compared to attacking alone.

The reason for the large rebate in potions and revives is that several defenders never get to fire off a charge attack at all.

For undefended gyms just shave off the first defenders, usually a blissey followed by snorlax or chansey. One attacker doesn't participate in the ousting fight but rather continues into the next defender.

For partially defended gyms, ie an occasional berry fed to the defender, both attackers got to work on the same defender, including the ousting fight.

Heavily defended gyms either have to be given up, or you'll need to restort to taking each defender down in two fights to either kick defenders out or at least force defending players to feed berries between each fight.

Moving between gyms after kicking defenders down one notch is another viable tactics. When the warning signal goes out a defending player needs to locate which gym is under attack and feed the defender a berry before it's gone. Quite often this takes more time than what's needed to enter fight number three and finish it.

Do keep attackers super effective or neutral against the current defender.

Three of four attackers can kick out each defender instantly, but you may not want to do this for some reason. In that case two attackers should keep going on the first defender in the gym while the remaining attacker(s) continue and hurt defenders further in the gym.

For heavily defended gyms you might need to keep every attacker rolling on the first defender to either push the cost for feeding golden razz berries into the unsustainable zone or kick defenders out by virtue of running defending players out of feeding slots.

Attacking mons are preferably super effective or neutral against the current defender.

Five or more attacker should normally avoid kicking defeners out instantly. It's more efficient to just brute force through the gym. Two or three players hammer the first defender into obvlivion and the rest make forays into the gym. It quickly becomes unsustainable to keep up coordinated feeding even if you're several defending players trying to keep the gym up remotely.

In the scenario where defending players do a comparatively decent job at feeding it might be a good idea to either send an attacker or two to the next gym, or simply shift gym altogether. In all likelyhood you've consumed a lot of feeding slots, and the second gym can't be defended at all.

Personally I prefer to just keep smashing into each gym. The cost for feeding a gym attacked by a full raid team is insane, and by the time you hit gym number three or four some of the defending players start depleting their berry storage.

This is basically attacking player motivation rather than pokemon motivation. For more players it's simply too scary to watch fifty berries drop to under forty in less than half an hour. Don't forget that many players actually use golden razz berries for catching raid bosses. They don't have berry supplies anywhere as large as the players who stack up on berries with a focus on gym raiding.

Also, while it's fun to know that one defending player in your team sits on 300 or more golden razz berries, that player can only feed each defender ten berries, and even a maxed out perfect blissey will see those slots consumed in under ten minutes.

Attacking mons are either sweepers or machamp. Using machamp against gardevoir is perfectly viable for a full raid. More often than not you won't find out what charge attack a defending pokemon has.

Boss raids

Notably a gym defended prior to an attractive boss raid usually can't be downed. You should expect players on site dropping the occasional berry into the gym without any semblance of coordination. The sheer number of berries fed into the gym will normally make it impossible to take it down.

Multistepping the gym also becomes impossible since attackers are just about everywhere in the gym, and you can't count on managing the synchronized endings of fights needed to kick a defender out in one go.

In this scenario either skip attacking the gym altogether or aim at maximising the cost in golden razz berries.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, berry feeding

Feeding mechanism

You can feed any pokemon in a friendly gym you're standing close to
You can feed any pokemon remotely in a gym when you have assigned a defender

Nanab berries are best for adding motivation. Razz berries and pinab berries give the same amount. Remote feeding a gym that is 'far away' will cut the motivation increase by 75%, but remote feeding a gym that is just out of range for normal interaction will yield the full value.

In either case you can only feed ten unique pokemon per half hour, and only ten berries per pokemon.

Observe 'unique'. If your snorlax in a gym gets kicked out after you fed it ten berries in rapid succession and are unable to feed it any more, it's still the same pokemon. Assigning it to a different gym won't allow you a new round of ten berries until that half an hour has passed.


There are basically two kinds of berry feeding.

• Trash bin
• Defence

Trash bin

Trash bin feeding is basically getting rid of your surplus standard berries for a small amount of stardust, badge XP and a shot at an extra candy.

My advice is to target gyms you're not standing in and keep track of your feeding slots. Especially if you're on the hunt for candy.

A newly assigned defender that has lost one fight can be restored to almost full motivation the first time you feed it three standard berries.

Unless you feel confident that a gym you have assigned a defender into won't come under attack any tie soon I'd advice you to avoid trash bin feeding the primary defenders in it.

That said I usually go through the gyms I have defenders in during evenings if I have a large surplus of standard berries. If they've lost marginal motivation I remote feed them exactly one berry each and make certain I have four or five feedings slots free in terms of the number of pokemon I can feed during one half an hour period. The yield is around 100 motivation.

Defence

This is where golden razz berries come into the picture

There are primarily three types of defensive feeding

• Preemptive
• Boss raid defence
• Gym defence

Preemptive feeding is done when the gym is peaceful but important defenders have fallen low enough in motivation to be kicked out after one lost battle. You decide wether to drop the gym entirely or ready it for future attacks.

Preemptive feeding is speculative. See it as an insurance. If the gym doesn't come under attack you lost a golden razz berry. However, the reason it never came under attack might just have been your feeding one or two defenders.

Boss raid defence is what happens the last twenty minutes or so prior to a legendary raid boss. It goes on for a full hour prior to an EX raid. The team that owns the gym pours in golden razz berries while just about everyone else hulks into the gym.

It's horribly expensive in terms of berries and a lot of fun. You're usually better off feeding everything in the gym. Maybe allow some moronic insertion of pikachu with a funny hat or crap like that to be kicked out. Defend the remaining five and assign something useful after ten minutes.

Gym defence is the reaction to a gym raid. Two or more players attack the gym and those in control try to stave off the attack.

Focus on blissey, chansey and snorlax. Especially if you have the opportinuty to have friendly players arriving on the scene. They can replace secondary defenders if you manage to keep the gym up for ten minutes.

Unless the attackers multistep the gym, in which case you're unlikely to be able to defend it anyway feed a berry every second combat against two attacker (or a solo player for that matter). Against four or more players you need to feed after every fight or you're going to see defenders drop out during the chaos.

For all practical purposes a gym attacked by a full raid team can't be defended remotely. The cost in potions and revives is neglible for the attackers, and there will be fights going on all over the gym simultaneously while two or three attackers continuously tear down the first defender in line.

Never feed every defender in a gym if you're defending a cluster of gyms. The attacking team will simply check when six feeding slots have been used and tear down the next gym while you watch in frustration. Even if you're spreading your defensive efforts your are, literally spread thin. What was once the ability to feed a specific defender 20 berries drops to 10 since one defending player ran out of feeding slots.

Also, make sure you can afford the cost in golden razz berries. We usually see either very few berries being used or well above fifty when we attack groups of gyms. Obviosuly it's not a single defender feeding all 50, but still. At one occasion we attacked through upwards to 200 berries. With that kind of numbers you'll run anyone but the most deidicated player dry on berries.

Don't forget that you want a minimum of golden razz berries left for actually throwing after raid bosses should something especially juicy pop up on your screen.

The first golden razz berry, or first group of berries fed into gym is the most important. My experience is that about half of the attacks cease immediately when prime defenders return to full motivation.

Next, very short article will be about gym oddities.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, gym defence

Gym defence is a matter of defenders, design and traffic density. While the article, and the one it links to, is a little dated, the main points still hold true.

Since the last article covered the bare bones defenders we'll have a closer look at design.


Whenever I'm bolding something it means it's the best pick whenever more than one is viable.


Design is a function of traffic density. Or at least it should be. I've read all kinds of crap stating that the same design is optimal for every gym, and that design being you should avoid motivation decay at all costs.

Lot's of camel dung being smoked there.


For an extremely low traffic density gym just assign whatever is in your recent list and you plan to transfer anyway. It's been a few days since anyone was here, and maybe within a week someone will visit the gym and kick you out.
Actually you want to avoid dropping your cared for chansey here. It'll drop to zero eventually, and what's worse, you risk getting it locked in.


For a standard low traffic density gym, which usually includes even central gyms when night is closing in, you can apply the numbers game and search for CP 1000 to 1999 pokemon to insert. I personally can't be arsed to do that. When the attack comes at five o'clock I'm usually asleep anyway.
These gyms are the only ones where the mainstream moronicity is applicable.


For a high traffic density gym you use maxed out defenders of top quality. These are also more or less the gyms gym raiders are truly interested in.
You expect the gym to come under attack with a depressing regularity.

Basically it means that a blissey and at least one of snorlax and chansey should be assigned to the gym. Preferably all three.


Sandwiching

The dilemma with these three defenders is that machamp is the preferred attacker for all three, which is the reason you should consider sandwiching in defenders which are problematic for machamp.

Clefable and gardevoir are your best bet since machamp is ineffective against these and they are supereffective against machamp with STAB for Dazzling Gleam to boot.

However, a maxed out example of the latter could be out of your grasp, and you may already have put in a lot of resources into vaporeon, lapras, steelix or donphan since before the release of the generation three pokemon.

Maybe you're pushing a milotic. If so I recommend you to stick with Waterfall / Surf despite the information given elsewhere. Reason being that attackers are far more likely to hulk into your water type defender with an electric type pokemon, read raikou, than using an exeggutor. The main culprit here is the overabundance of gyardos in gyms, and grass type pokemon simply doesn't compete when it comes to shredding gyarados.

Of these I recommend that you keep lapras out of the gyms until rayquaza vasnishes as a legendary raid boss.

A Counter / Play Rough donphan would do the job.


Observe that sandwiching only helps with cutting down attackers who walz right through the gym, and only if they're two or less.


Bulking up

If your local meta is defined by shaving then sandwiching won't help much. You're better off either bulking up och going for the throat.

Bulking up is primarily effective where you very seldom see more than two players attacking and shaving a gym.

This means dumping vaporeon, lapras and, surprisingly, wigglytuff into the gym.

If you're using your brain instead of smoking camel dung you're running with a Pound / Play Rough or Dazzling Gleam setup for wigglytuff. Wigglytuff is a fairy / normal type pokemon, so it's doubly moronic to suggest that you pick Feint Attack as your primary attack.

STAB pumps Pound to the same level as Feint Attack, and since there is very little reason for an attacker to swap out machamp (due to doing neutral damage to wigglytuff) and start digging up a steel type pokemon, you don't want a dark type attack which is ineffective against fighting type pokemon, which is why Feint Attack sucks.

Why not have a steel type pokemon in the standard attacking party? Well, this is the bulking up meta, and you're having vaporeon in every gym, and steel type attacks are patently crap against water type defenders.


Going for the throat

There are comparatively few gyms where you play, but pokestops are everywhere. This means all players are starved for potions and revives.

In this meta you want to pump out as much hurt as possible.

You'll be assigning some previously rather dubious defenders to gyms for this reason, and dragonite with Dragon Tail / Outrage is your best friend here. Despite battles taking next to no time this pokemon is worth pouring golden razz berries into in this meta.

Slaking suddenly starts to look like a decent defender since Play Rough is easy to miss, and it will wipe out the attacking machamp. Notable drawback is that it must be fed a berry between fights to do any damage at all.

Gardevoir and Espeon can be used for the combination of Confusion and superior attack stats. Tyranitar negates Espeon though.

If you're lucky enough to have a legacy Exeggutor with Confusion, just give it Seed Bomb as a charge attack and it's ready to go.

A Waterfall / Crunch gyarados will inflict a surprising amount of damage to the attacking electeic type poekmon during the very few seconds the fight lasts. If you're currently out of dragonites you can afford assigning to gyms this might be an option.


All in all I'd aim for a combination of sandwiching and going for the throat. Save vaporeon for relative outlier gyms.

Feed berries every second combat unless you're feeding a slaking or there is intensive agressive traffic into the gym. In that case either give up or pour in a berry every fight. Otherwise you'll end up losing defenders further into the gym as staggered attacks take down defenders inside the gym simultaneously.

The first golden razz berry is your greatest deterrent. My experience is that it immediately kills off half of the attacks. For the rest you're likely going to need coordinated feeding, which means you need to be in contact with a second defender who can take over when you're running out of feedling slots.

More on berry feeding in the next article.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, attackers

Unless you're happy only assigning defenders to gyms someone else tore down, in which case you're not a gym raider at all, then you need an attacking line-up in order to be able to assign anything at all.

First of all we need to define the term gym raider.

It's not a solo player. Don't get me wrong here. Many of the best players I've met out there are solo players, but they aren't gym raiders. They simply lack that aggregated skill set.


A gym raider is a player who attacks gyms together with other players of the same team and more often than not defends conquered gyms together with those players. The attacking part is vital. Gym raiders who don't defend gyms just tend not to stay in them for very long.

Note the plural. Gyms as well as players. If you're three players walking down to that lonely gym every day you're not raiders. You're making certain that gym stays in your posession.


So, let's move on to the bare bones minimum attacking force. You want to at least be able to fill out one predefined attacking team now when we have access to this nifty party beta.

Talking about parties. I know it sucks, but you just have to wipe that party from time to time and create the same one placing it last since Niantic, in their divine wisdom, decided to list the parties in the reverse order you get access to them when you want to use them.

You want that party to be the first one to show up when you swipe left. More on why in a later article.


Six pokemon, with 15 attack stat if possible. Bolded are best.

• Machamp (Counter / Dynamic Punch) x 2
• Dragonite or Rayquaza (Dragon Tail / Outrage) x 1
• Zapdos (Charge Beam / Thunderbolt) or Raikou (Thunder Shock / Wild Charge) x 1
• Two more attackers

The six pokemon above are needed. Just get them maxed out.

Why those?

Gyms nowdays are populated by blissey, snorlax and, quite often, chansey. Add tyranitar, aggron, lapras and rhydon. Fighting attacks rule the day. I personally run with a third machamp as one of the two extras. Avoid flying type pokemon since machamp is ineffective against those. So no dragonites and gyarados as your targets. Also avoid fairy type pokemon like clefable and gardevoir. You'll get wiped out.

Dragon type attacks are largely unresisted. More often than not, when in doubt, attack with a dragon. Both dragonite and rayquaza come with superior attack stats combined with good to decent bulk. Dragontypes are an expensive but perfectly decent option when you're cleaning out dragonites in gyms. Sure, you'll take a beating, but you'll also make quick work of the defender without resorting to digging up that ice type attacker.

An electric type attacker is sweet to have for the ever present gyarados and vaporeon in gyms. Electric is also largey unresisted whenever your dragonite/rayquaza runs into problems.

The two extras depend on your local meta game. Where I live that chansey is almost always inserted into gyms together with the mandatory blissey and snorlax, and players here have learned to pump up their defenders. Thus I run with a third machamp.

For some obscure reason rhydon got extremely, and golem quite, popular locally, so I've been running with an exeggutor (Bullet Seed / Solar Beam) as the last party member since it absolutely destroys rhydon and golem. Now we're seeing more and more fairy type pokemon, so I'm thinking of swapping that one out in favour of an aggron (Iron Tail / Heavy Slam) or metagross (Bullet Punch / Flash Cannon).

Another place might see good use for a kyogre or gyarados (Waterfall / Hydro Pump). Maybe you're overdosing on plants locally, in which case I could see a use for moltres or entei (Fire Spin / Overheat)

No matter what, your local huting ground will have it's own idiosyncracies. The two last slots are for handling those. You want those two attackers. Don't cheat on them.

Max out that attacking line-up. You can go play the threshold game for boss raiding for all I care, or use level 33 attackers for rarely encountered defenders. But don't cheat on your primary attacking line-up. Level 40 they go. It's six pokemon for crying put loud.

Sure, as you collect more stardust and recall dinging level 40 yourself with a sense of nostalgica, you'll wind up with a plethora of maxed out attackers, but then you're hardly new to the extreme end game any longer.

Next article up will cover the bare bones defenders.

New to the extreme end-game, gym raider, bag

This is the first in a short series of articles about the new extreme end-game gym-raider.

Let's have a look at one archetypical player -- the avid gym-raider. Let's combine that archetype with a player who is also new to or closing in on the extreme end-game.

Level 38. That's the holy grail. It's the last level where the game gives a player any potential long-time benefits. At level 38 you can push a pokemon to level 40, and, well, that's it. From here on it's just about grinding for better material in terms of the number of attractive pokemon you have available.

Bag-size: 1500. This is the by far most powerful upgrade you can get in the game. Just max out your bag to minimise problems with how many items you have of one type. Upgrading your bag takes priority over anything else you can shop for coins.

Pokemon Storage: The number of pokemon you have plus 100. 1500 is nice to have, but it's not vital. However, under no circumstances do you want to sit with a really sought after pokeon caught without room to collect it. Players with Gotcha or Plus should aim for plus 200. You're likely to clean out your storage after a finished session rather than discarding low-grade pokemon on the go.


Pokeballs: Whatever ensures you don't run out of them. This is highly individual.

Pots and revives: 150 or more of each. You'll burn through them at a depressing rate if you go gym-raiding. Observe that the basic potion doesn't even count towards the number 150.

Golden Razz Berries: 100 or more. Defending a gym is expensive.

Other berries: Whatever floats your boat. I personally go for zero with the exception of Pinab Berries which I want around 20 of. Use friendly gyms as trash bins for excess berries. Target defenders of a kind where you want candy. Do overfeed them if you have a surplus of berries. You still get 20 stardust and a small chance for a candy.


Anything else is optional. Sure, I keep a minimum of premium raid passes, star pieces, lures and so on. but they're not actually needed for gym-raiding. These are items that make my gaming more enjoyable. Arguably star pieces and rare candies do help to a very large degree to keep your line-up top notch. As for lucky eggs. Use them until you hit 38. After that they cease to have any functional value what so ever.


I like massively overpowered legendary raids. They resupply my storage of revives and hyper potions. My stash of golden razz berries and rare candies, however, isn't impacted by the number of boss-raiders during a given raid. Note though that if you're prone to enter a boss-raid with the minimum players required you're likely to pay in terms of potions and revives rather than gain from boss-raiding.

For this reason I spend less time spinning stops and gyms in order to resupply on potions and revives.

I dislike going below half a dozen premium passes, but again this is individual. A healthy supply of lure modules and incense, a dozen or more of both, makes me a happier player. While I'm currently overdosing on star pieces I'd rather avoid going below half a dozen. Always having access to three hours worth of 150% stardust is the minimum for me.

When it comes to TM I discard down to 20 for Fast TM. I could probably discard down to 10 (as in I really ought to do that). You usually burn through your Charge TM quicker, so I have yet to discard those.

I personally try to stay below 100 rare candies, but I have full respect for those who want 245 candies. That gives you the opportunity to max out anything you just caught given enough stardust, which is 225000 star dust for a level 20 pokemon. And before anyone jumps in and says that you need 248 candies -- you can't catch anything without collecting three candies.

Observe that this is only true for pokemon you want to max out in their current form. There is a cost for evolving as well.

While stardust isn't something that takes up space in your bag it's still a limiting factor. I basically refuse to go below 225k stardust in order to be able to pump up anything I collect given enough candy to do so.

I keep one each of the evolve items. They will probably never see any use, but I can waste five bag slots.

Lucky eggs are a waste of bag space for me. I keep five as a gimmick since that's the number of lucky eggs I have left as level rewards. There is no rationale behind this, but hey, it's a game. You're supposed to have some fun. And yes, I immediately discard 25 lucky eggs when I shop the current big-pack.

Next article will be about the bare bones minimum for attacking gyms.

Kyogre raid boss

Seems there are still some questions about how to handle it.

Basically, if it has Blizzard as a charge move you might want to rethink your lineup.


Raikou is always good, so if you have a good one put it to use.


Jolteon, victrebeel and sceptile are good as a first attacker no matter the moveset of Kyogre.



Non-blizzard:

• Zapdos
• Exeggutor
• Venusaur

Blizzard (if you care about incoming damage):

• Groudon with Solar Beam
• Kyogre with Thunder
• Ho-Oh with Solar Beam

Personally I run with the same lineup no matter what. Jolteon first, then Victrebeel and after that Zapdos and Exeggutor. The cost in potions and revives is massive against Blizzard, so you might not want to do this. My reason is that I prioritise damage done over damage taken, and hence the preferred Blizzard-alternatives are a no-go as far as I'm concerned.

Harder than beating the boss is catching it. Switch AR on and off and it'll reset in the centre for an easier throw.

Gym battles, network error

My sample size isn't all that great, but with the latest client network error is merely bloody awful but not a total blocker when you're trying to attack a gym where you have previously boss raided the same day or late the previous day.

For some reason leaving after every battle slightly mitigates the problem. It's not a guaranteed work around, but at least my personal experience is that it enables you to run every third battle or so without an error.

While I wouldn't continue through a gym with six full defenders, using this trick is worth it if the gym is almost down from the beginning.


The problem with contamination still persists though. By contamination I'm referring to how one trainer who runs into the network error will spread that error to other trainers currently fighting the same defender even if they haven't boss raided that gym at all.


A final fix for this problem seems to be something we'll have to wait for some time.

Gym raiding, what use could a casual possibly be

So, you're playing the end game, and you're tearing down gyms. Now, if a player doing the middle game, ie levels 20 to 32, offers to help, is it even worth it?

The answer is yes. Most definitely yes.

I'm being helped by my wife, and she started playing in May. She's started helping out since she reached level 25, at which time I was closing in on 40.

Her contribution when clearing out gyms cuts time by 30 percent, and since we're burning down seven gyms late each evening that's a huge help.


Tactics

I burn down the first defender and after that she joins the battle. Since my line-up plays in a totally different league compared to hers she'll never catch up. However, I usually don't catch up to her until she's burning down the last defender.

By that time five defenders have been cleared out of the gym, and I never need to bother with the second round out of the three needed to wipe out a gym.

The thing here is to have the lower level player wait for the first defender to go down before entering combat. It saves the high level player time while at the same time conserving revives and potions for the lower level one.

As an added bonus you get a player well versed in gym raiding by the time that player leaves the middle game and starts playing high level Pokemon Go.

The downside is the insertion of questionable defensive material into the gym, but let's stay honest here. If you were alone the gym would get one defender assigned. A second defender in the 1500 to 2500 CP range still adds to the defence. Especially if it's a selected defender.

A last advice. Don't push it too far. A middle game player has access to maybe four potentially top class defenders which have been powered up as far as that player is able to. Going above ten gyms will totally deplete that players caapcity.

XP gain, stardust drain

As some of you are bound to have noticed the current fad with huting down legendary raids is a brutal hit to our stardust income.

I'm no better off. Running from raid to raid and spending time waiting for people to group up. In the end very few pokemon get caught per hour played, and dust has dropped from some 25K a day to a mere 10 to 15K.


There really is very little to do about it, and I just wanted to make people aware of it. Especially since the last XP and stardust bonanza hid the underlying dilemma very well.

Some of you might have the problem hidden by the continued inflow of XP. Every time you knock a legendary down another 10K XP flows in, and that has you getting that much closer to next level. Which would be all good but for the problems keeping your line-up maxed out.


Well, I'm off getting more XP and less stardust. There's another bird waiting for me out there.

Legendary raids, city view from the two day event

Observe that I live in Gothenburg, Sweden. We're rabid maniacs when it comes to organising, and the city area houses some 650 K inhabitants.


Legendary raids pop up all over the place. It's quite frankly insane, and to be honest it grows old pretty quickly.


The best part is running into fifty or sixty players coming for each raid. Obviously spread out over time, but still. Apart from a morning raid, which I had to run with six other players, fifteen to twenty players per group was normal. For the last two raids we went for private groups, which was great for individual dps but kind of mean to casual players at the raid.


Overall a 33% catch rate seemed to be the norm. Variation between players was large, but collecting one every three raids seems realistic.


Rather unsurprisingly 15+ random players steamroll right through these boss fights with well over half the time left. At one time we averaged a level of over 35 and the boss basically keeled over and died more or less immediately.


The big groups at the raids aren't just a matter of living in a city. I started this post by stating that we're rabid maniacs for organising stuff. The raid chats numbers well over 300 participants. People congregate on raid points like biblical locust.


Oh, XP intake is also absurd. As is the gifts of stardust and candy. Eggs pop through the incubators at an absurd rate and your buddy is on a feeding frenzy. Add that massive cluster spawns are all around us.

Personal from Japan

Second day in a village in Japan. Two stops, that's all.

There's a small city kind of close, and things are very, very different from home.

Just about every pokestop and gym is sponsored, so shopping malls sit on sweet clusters, and apart from that there's very little to be seen.

Farfetch'd is glaringly absent, again a major difference from the relatively common occurence of Mr Mime back home.

In this small community basically every gym I've seen, which is a modest thirty or so, is filled to capacity and well fed. This in turn speaks of a relatively low turnover, or at least one where opposing teams basically swap gyms in a coreographed dance of hostile cooperation.

Cluster spawns occur with a frequency I'm unused to from home, but apart from those this rural area lives up to every preconception I've had about spawn desolation.

While the gyms are well fed and filled, I've yet to see a single person play PoGo in an obvious way. No cabling running from pocket to phone, no erratic walking to reach a stop, and obviously no upwards sweeping over the screen to catch a mon.

Btw, wheezing was an absolute joke. I knew that level two raids were soloable, but I didn't expect them to be an insult.

Wishful thinking about gyms

I used to do quite a lot of game design as a hobby of mine.

PoGo is reminiscent of old collectible card games. Main difference being where you collected cards and played a game, in PoGo you can only collect cards, because the gyms hardly deserve to be called a game.

Let's leave the obvious fix aside. We won't see trainer duels for some time yet. Instead we'll have a look at the atrociously implemented gyms.


The CP idiocy

Only a moron would sort defenders by CP. Which says everything about the staff at Niantic.

Anyone with at least a partially functioning brain would have gone for LIFO as the quick and dirty solution. The player that tears down a gym and pops the first mon into it goes on top. That way there's very little benefit in pushing the last 8K prestige from 42 to 50, because you'll end up at the bottom.

This is good game design, because it adds balance into the very game mechanics. Gyms want to get smaller, and the personal cost benefit ratio decerases as gym levels increase. It also promotes true cooperation because only a team can have members, well, take one for the team and place last.

From LIFO you could go into more advanced solutions requiring a little book keeping. Like where the one who has added most prestige to the gym (during it's current iteration of the same colour) goes on top.



Cooldown for prestige

More basic stuff: How the bleeding hell could they forget to implement 'battle winners have priority' for adding prestige to a gym.

Currently the gym opens up a new spot when you see 'Victory' on the screen, which means you're screwed if someone wants to steal the spot.

You still have to leave combat, wait for the 'You lose / You win' message, watch the gym get more prestige, click out of the gym and click back in. By the time you're done the thief has assigned a pokemon to the gym AND finished smoking a cigarette while grinning at you.



How to add diversity

Gym's are part of a monotone grinding experience, cause that's what Niantic knows. They're good at implementing grinding, but are clueless when it comes to creating games.

Just the way pokemon and attacks are of different types, with corresponding matching benefits and penalties, gyms should be.

Let's look at a hypothetical psychic / grass gym.

• grass and / or psychic pokemon take 80% damage (attacker and defender)
• grass and / psychic attacks deal 125% damage
• ground, rock, water, fighting and poison pokemon take 125% damage (attacker and defender) for each matching type.

We can stop there. Dropping a vaporeon inside would effectively cut it's HP by 50 or more, thus for all practical purposes turning it into a dragonite but doing far less damage.

Using a dragonite in an ice type gym would see it take 169% increased damage.

This simple change would totally rewrite the map on good gym defenders and attackers, and we'd end up with a game where we'd actually benefit from careful planning where to place our stardust.

How not to add diversity

There are some extreme morons who should be kept away from anything resembling game design. They believe faulty design can be saved by imposing artificial limitations. In the CCG world it's usually done by placing a limit on how many copies of the same card you're allowed to have in your deck.

Hard caps are the hallmarks of an incompetent designer.

It's lazy and a clear sign the game designer is better off getting paid for asking you if you want fries with it.

Unsurprisingly this seems to the direction PoGo is going in.

Maintenance costs

This is good game design to prevent individual players from becoming too dominant. Basically you have to pay some kind of upkeep cost for every gym you have a pokemon assigned to in order to avoid some kind of penalty.

It looks like PoGo is going in this direction, which is would be good news.

Poorly implemented it'll force a player to physically revisit every gym, which permanently hands PoGo victory to GPS-spoofers. Remote gyms are only remote for players who actually walk there.

Command limitations

This is better game design to prevent individual players from becoming too dominant. Basically you say that an individual trainer can't interact with more than a given number of gyms without getting sloppy.

In-game this would translate into having a ceiling on how many gyms you can have pokemon assigned to and still get the full benefit from all of them. For each gym you assign a pokemon to after that ceiling you'll suffer from some kind of penalty. Most likely in the form of a minor nerf to each and every pokemon you have assigned to gyms, or even better, also a nerf to your ability when it comes to attacking a gym.

Soft caps are the hallmarks of someone skilled at designing games.

The level 40 squad

Didn't come to visit in the first place.

For some peculiar reason I've been dragged into some kind of high level network, which is kind of funny since I avoid getting too much XP.


These are people who are brutally effective at amassing XP, especially the level 40 ones.

Some seem to be really good at attacking gyms and adding prestige to friendly ones.

But...


... I get the feeling they're rather poor raiders.


While most of the tips and tricks on this blog is aimed at increasing individual performance, that part takes a backseat when it comes to raiding.


Really, it does.


If you have the organisational skills and charisma needed to get a dozen players to get outdoors day after day after day, then you'd probably do perfectly fine by just evolving the highest CP mons you caught and throwing around power ups at random.

Half a dozen players hulking into a gym will tear it down in minutes no matter what crap each player uses for a lineup. And if five or six gyms in an area gets pumped up to 10 and filled with mons, multiple times per day if needed, it doesn't matter at all what kind of crap goes into those gyms. Players from rival teams will just look at them with disgust and give up.


That's raiding. It's a social skill, not a technical one.


The level 40 squad caught pokemon, spun stops, made the elevator-ride in a gym, popped the lucky eggs and hatched a horde of eggs -- alone. Cause ganging up on a gym means a loss in terms of getting XP.

Ganging up on gyms. That's raiding. Doing it over and over and over again, that's being a raider.

That's my game.

Gym battles, creating territory

What if you live in a place where your team effectively lacks a gym presence?

To begin with, if you can't locate half a dozen players you're screwed. They don't all have to be high level, but three of you should be. Still, try keeping everyone above level 27.

So, how to proceed?

First of all you need to do some scouting in force. Try out a few areas and tear a gym down. How quickly does it get rebuilt, if at all?

Elimitate areas where the response is immediate.

Next step is to bubble a gym to 10 and place a really good defender inside. So one prestige pokemon and one maxed out blissey or snorlax.

Then a short checklist:

• Is the gym torn down quickly
• Does it keep being torn down if you keep at it for a week
• If not, do players from your team spontaneously assign pokemon to it

No matter if you see extra players from your team or not inside that gym, provided it stays up, you've just created a foothold.

This is when you go aggressive. Repeat the process with another two gyms, and have the players you're in contact with assign pokemon to them actively. If at all possible, make them team up with you and help tearing those two added gyms down.

You'll probably lose at least one of the three gyms immediately. Try expanding in the other direction, and stay at it for a week or two.

It could fail, and then it's up to you if you give up or not, but you could just as well end up with two stable gyms. If so, push for another two in order to gain a third. You always have to push at least one more gym than the ones you plan to hold.

Three stable gyms counts as territory.

Any gym that normally stays up for three days or more is stable.

This isn't mere theory crafting. This is experience. I've seen two attempts crash and burn, but three other areas where we previously had zero stable gyms by now sport two (ok, less than territory), six and eight stable gyms respectively.

The gym-pair is associated with one gym we push to 10 daily or every second day.

The six gym territory sees another three repeatedly pushed to 10, but those usually only last for a day or so.

The eight gym one might have become a ten gym one. We don't know, but the local raidgroup usually push another three. A punishment raid surprisingly resulted in three out of four pushed gyms staying up for three days thus far.

Creating territory has the added benefit of increasing morale in your team. In our case the eight gym territory gave birth to a relatively nearby seven gym one. I can only assume local players there thought: "If they can do it, why not we?"

Stardust and candy blues

What is good stardust and candy management?

Subjective, I'd say, so I'll just give you my personal preferences and the reasons for them.


My stance

I'm a firm advocate for the zero stardust, and candy, collection. I also believe in pushing a pokemon to max despite the diminishing returns.

As for candy there's one exception -- I save 12 candy (or multiples thereof) for pokemon currently locked inside a gym to be able to push the the last clicks when that gym is torn down.

Whenever I get enough stardust to power-up one of the pokemon I'm pushing I do exactly that. That translates into me very seldom having more than 10000 stardust.


My reason

My reasoning is that stardust, and candy for that matter, is worthless until it's applied inside a gym or when I'm attacking a gym.

Whenever I power-up a pokemon it becomes a tiny bit stronger, be it for the purpose of defending a gym or attacking one.

While the cost for pushing a lot of pokemon to their limits means a horrendous cost in stardust as well as candy, it also means I can place high quality defenders in a gym while minimising the risk of taking on the bouncer role.

A CP 3200 snorlax, or a CP 3100 vaporeon, might not be all that much better in terms of game mechanics when it comes to defending a gym compared to their 2900 and 2800 CP counterparts. However, they usually place above gyarados, rhydon and, quite often, even dragonites in gym.

They almost always place above defending blissey.


My goal

My first goal is to have a dozen maxed out quality defenders. Despite my explicit playstyle and my being level 38 I still only have nine.

Sure, half a dozen high CP crap defenders and a dozen 'for lolz' pokemon, added to that line-up, but apart from vaporeon, candy and not stardust is the limiting factor.


The process

I'm currently pushing a blissey and a snorlax from very low levels with a zero candy collection. Needless to say this is extremely slow.

In the meanwhile I max out my prime defenders that aren't locked inside gyms, or rather did, because that part is done now barring the defenders I haven't seen the last weeks.

For now I'm finishing off doing power-ups to the 'fun' pokemon while waiting for more snorlax and chansey candy, mostly because I can simply forget about those mons after they receive one power-up each. That should keep me occupied for another week or so.

After that I'll pick one, or possibly two, vaporeon to push a little extra and rotate adding power-ups to another stiff dozen pokemon. That will last all through level 38, which is about two more months of playing.

Level 39? Maxing out those close to 50 pokemon and start looking at the 100 IV crap I have lying around. I quite frankly don't have any use for more than fifteen maxed out first class defenders.

What about a maxed out 100 beedrill with poor attacks instead? Or a sneasel? Level 39 will be all for fun.

Easter event, first day impression

After the first day of the event I've gathered a few impressions.

It's raining xp, as is usual for these kind of events. What's supposed to be a double xp run quickly turns into an xp bonanza as players make an extra effort to push the gain. Instead of making 20 - 50 K xp during the day, they make 200, 500, or in extreme cases well over a million XP.

Old eggs, that is eggs collected before the event, do indeed award double xp, but the candy isn't doubled.

2 km eggs may hatch pokemon youldn't normally get from them. However, that kind of happens once in a blue moon.

2 km eggs seem to pop more often than usual from pokestops.

If you're after the candy rather than the pokemon you won't get all that happy if that specific pokemon does hatch from a 2 km egg. The candy reward is still the one associated with a 2 km egg, and even if doubled that's not very much.

Crap is still crap. 5 km eggs may award double candy, and who cares?

10 km eggs are a potential goldmine. Upwards to 60 candy could pop up for the lucky player who gets the right pokemon.

This is an event you really want to spend outdoors. Apart from double xp it's centered around eggs, and you need to make that extra distance to get the full rewards.

If you're sped levelling this is it. At half the cost you can go bonkers on those lucky eggs.

Have fun. I do.