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I find it hard to belive in how well balanced the Pokémon games are. Not only inside the games, where you'll amazingly find balance from the very begining to the very end, but, surprisingly, even when things go competitive. If you ever played the simulators around you'll know what I'm talking about (see www.smogon.com). Thousands of unique Pokémon, moves, traits and items. Yet, try finding a single broken strategy. You'll not. And if you do find something obscure that could give you a good advantage, you'll realize it's impossible. The emerging competitive scenario is one of the most amazing strategy games I've ever seem, and it's not even a feature of the Pokémon games!

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What do you mean by "balance"? Some definitions of that term would mean, "being able to win with any Pokemon team", which seems... unlikely to be true. – Nicol Bolas Feb 24 '12 at 0:01
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Might also be noted that Pokemon at the end of the day is just a Rock-Paper-Scissors game with some 'abilities' that add in a bit of flair.. I say that simply because it doesnt matter what abilities you use if you have opposed pokemon-types in battle and are the rock to their paper. – James Feb 24 '12 at 1:56
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@Dokkat: Put that in your question, not in a comment below it. – Nicol Bolas Feb 24 '12 at 3:27
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I agree with @James. I think that, at the end of the day, it just comes down to it being a rock-paper-scissors type of game (i.e. where everything is weak against one thing and strong against another). – Richard Marskell - Drackir Feb 24 '12 at 4:46
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Pokemon is not balanced unless you include post-hoc rules; without them, the game has plenty of degenerate strategies. There's nothing magical going on here, and this is not an interesting question. – Joe Wreschnig Jul 26 '12 at 11:37
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4 Answers

up vote 11 down vote accepted

I highly recommend you to check this AltDevBlogADay article on the very same topic. It basically says that the balancing process can be automatized to some point in a mathematical way.

http://altdevblogaday.com/2012/02/17/the-craft-of-game-systems-tuning-rpg-content/

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Any game requiring strategy requires many iterations to get right. Having worked on multiple games that required balancing, I've learned that you start extremely early during production on the creation of different rules and abilities and immediately start balancing them.

There is no "silver bullet" that will guarantee a well-balanced game. Each time a new ability is created you must weigh it against your existing set to make sure there will be little to no chance of exploiting with it.

The Pokémon card game, specifically, is a relatively simple strategy game in terms of what the abilities do compared to a card game like Magic: The Gathering. Many of the Pokémon abilities do damage only, others just apply poison, or some other simple thing related to damage. You can only have two cards in the "active" position for combat. Compare this to magic where you can have a whole field of cards that can attack, many cards respond to events that occur, cards in hand can interrupt other actions. Long story short, some games are much easier to balance than others based on the range of abilities a player has at their disposal, and for most strategy game there's no way to cover every possible case without plenty of testing and iteration, reworking things until they feel fair and still fun.

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I am not familiar with the Pokemon games, but your description makes me think that a genetic algorithm approach to test the whole domain of possible teams would be possible. That would allow the running algo to figure out the best teams and therefore find any broken strategies... something the OP could be interested in. – ADB Feb 27 '12 at 18:55
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I think this is the right answer. There may be a lot of visual/apparent complexity in the form of the various pokemon types, but their actual combat mechanisms are limited. Combine that with the same framework used again and again over the sequels, has a way of ironing out bugs. – Kzqai Mar 27 '12 at 19:14

While I've been out of the competitive pokemon scene for a while, when I left it was anything but balanced; if you didn't run legends, there was no point in even trying. And bugs? get out of town.

Looking over smogon, it seems things have changes (sycther good? wut?). So it seems balance was achieved the good old fashioned way; lots of iteration. Introduction of new systems, and insuring nothing got to out of hand.

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it is way too expensive wat u mean by balanced game. the pokemon and star wars wiki are designed in such a way that the database of complete storyline occurs as many pages in the site. look at the details in serebii.net website the bulbapedia also provides such drastic explanation.The only reason why this might be true that a balance of moves and types of pokemon are made an instance in the game rather than individual pokemon. looking at the design code every pokemon is managed by its type and the type of its attack so what so ever is its type a tm move advantage will also occur. so the perfect answer to your question is that pokemon games include diversity classification based on group methods rather than individual intances belonging to various groups.This is the reason why theese become so balanced

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