Go Anywhere & Catch 'em all

Looking for tips on Pokémon Go? Since we're fans too, we wanted to create a few tips and tools for the Pokémon community.
Here are a few statistics and strategies from our team:

  1. The game gets really interesting only when you reach the higher levels because the goal is to accumulate Pokémon with high CP and to catch these Pokémons, you need to level up quickly. Here's a chart that shows the XP gains needed to advance.  

  2. The fastest way to level up and gain XP is to use a Lucky Egg, which you will receive on the level highlighted in orange (we also highlighted the levels where you receive an incubator). This doubles your XP for 30 mins, and the highest XP gains of 500 XP come from Evolving Pokémon, Hatching Eggs (+300 XP for a 2 km Egg, +500 XP from a 5 km Egg, +1000 XP for a 10 km Egg), and adding new Pokémon to your Pokédex . Since you only have 9 eggs (and a limited number of incubators) and it is difficult to get new Pokémon, you should focus on Evolving Pokémon as you can evolve 75 Pokémons within 30 mins to gain 75,000 XP.

  3. In the early levels, instead of trying to catch 'em all, we've found it's most efficient to focus on catching Caterpie, Weedle & Pidgey because it only takes 12 candies to evolve. You'll need to catch at least 244 of these and transfer 169 of them to accumulate enough candies to optimize the use of your Lucky Egg. After that, you should have gotten to at least Level 9 and your first Lucky Egg.

    You would also need to visit 82 Pokestops that yield 3 Poké balls each, and then shoot each perfectly to catch 244 Pokémon. So including the Pokédex registration bonus, you'd have a minimum of 30,000XP and be at Level 8 before you could optimally use your first Lucky Egg to level up quickly, gaining 75,000 XP (excluding any extra XP gains during 30 mins) taking you to 105,000XP and Level 15.

  4. We couldn't resist trying to catch 'em all so one of our teammates built a system to optimize our evolutions using a Lucky Egg earlier rather than evolving only Caterpie, Weedle & Pidgey.

    She used this system to evolve 62 Caterpie, Weedle & Pidgey, and 9 other Pokémon (including 3 of Eevee) to create 8 new Pokémon in our Pokédex for a total of 71 evolutions. She still had 31 secs left so we assume that at least 2 more evolutions were possible. She jumped from 132,320 XP at Level 16 and gained 79,100 XP to move to 211,420 XP at Level 20 using her first Lucky Egg.

  5. About your egg incubators, be reminded to always use the limited ones for the highest distance eggs . You should never use a limited incubator for a 2 km egg, use it only for a 5 km, and if you are lucky, for a 10 km. To make sure you keep enough of them, don't be afraid to use your infinite incubator for the 2 km , it's fast and it will give you plenty of candies to evolve your Pokémons.

Now that you know how to level up fast, let's move on to the next step:
Pokémon Battles!


First, to take part of the Pokémon battle, you will have to go to a Gym . Then, you will have to choose a Team Color. As much as possible, try to be on the same team color as your friends, it will enable you to play in a team with them and take control of the Gyms together.

Every gym has a level, and one Pokémon defending the gym by level. Only one Pokémon by trainer can defend a gym, this is why it's useful to attack a gym with your friends than to increase its level and have more Pokémon defending it in order to keep it longer.

Why battle at a Gym?
You can earn 10 PokéCoins after you place a Pokémon in a gym. You can collect PokéCoins once every 21 hours by going to the Shop and clicking on the green badge on the top right corner to earn 10 PokéCoins for each Gym you are currently defending (with a maximum of 10 Gyms, note that it will be difficult to keep 10 anyway).

 

(Left) Click the top right shield icon to collect your coins!
(Right) How a gym looks like on the map 

Earning PokéCoins will enable you to buy some additional Lucky Eggs and keep gaining more and more XP and trainer levels. At the same time, you could also buy additional Egg Incubators to incubate high IV Pokemon.

While you attack an adverse gym, you have to choose 6 Pokémons that will fight for you. The point is to know which ones will be the best to help you the most. Luckily we are here to make your life easier:

First of all, you have to know 4 things about your Pokémon

  • It has a CP which will give you a global idea of its ability to fight. The higher your CP is, the better your Pokémon will fight.
  • Each Pokémon has a Type (i.e.: Fire, Ice, fairy, etc.)
  • Each Pokémon has 2 attack modes, a normal attack mode and a special attack mode. 

Note that a Pokémon also has a hiding IV, that can make it stronger or not. Since your level is going to grow fast, it's useless to focus on that before the last level. It's better to focus on the CP because the IV won't change the level of your Pokémon too much. In addition, since the recent update, you can now have a global idea of your Pokémon's IV. It's always good to know, but still keep the highest CP, unless it's very close.

You can find the best CP each Pokémon can reach here.

  • Here is the important point: When you are about to attack a Gym, you have to check which Pokémons are defending it to be able to choose your offense. The type of Pokémon you battle will affect the efficiency of the damage it will undergo.

Find here a table were you will find the type of each Pokémon (note that some Pokemon have 2 types) and a table with the weakness and the strength of each type.

For each Pokémon defending the Gym you have to find its type, then find which one of your Pokémon has an attack mode that's effective to use against the defender.

Well, now that you beat all the Pokémon defending the Gym, and decreased the Gym's prestige to 0 (you may have to beat all the Pokémon more than once as the Gym's Prestige goes down by 2000 prestige points each time) you have to choose a Pokémon and assign it to defend the Gym that you just conquered!

Note that one of the benefits to play with a teammate is right after beating a Gym, the first trainer that assigns a Pokémon to the Gym will become the new Gym owner. Even if he is not from the same team color as you (it could be disappointing if a trainer having the same color as the one you just defeated takes the gym you just won). You either have to be really fast, or have to ask your teammate to get ready.

So you have to choose a Pokémon to defend the Gym. Since you don't know who will be the assailant, and there are plenty of various Pokémon that will try to take the Gym from you, you obviously can't choose your defender by type.

Luckily there is an advantage for the Pokémon defending the Gym: its HP will be double while defending.

Therefore the point is to choose the Pokémon with the highest HP .

Here the 10 Pokémon with the highest base HP :

Pokémon
Base HP
1. Chansey
500
2. Snorlax
320
3. Wigglytuff
280
4. Lapras
260
5. Vaporeon
260
6. Jigglypuff
230
7. Kangaskhan
210
8. Rhydon
210
9. Muk
210
10. Gyarados
190

 

If you're enough lucky to get one of them with a high CP, then you should use them to defend the Gym you harshly conquered!

Otherwise, use one of your Pokémon with the highest HP (tip : you can class your Pokémon by HP, since you won't have a lot of time to put a Pokémon inside the gym, try to set up your Pokémon's search by HP before to assail its).

Here a list of the base stats by Pokémon!

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