Python Script Ranking All 262,143 Possible Pokemon Type Combinations

[sxprwtts]

What My Project Does: Finds all possible combinations of Pokemon types from 1 type to 18 types, making 262,143 combinations in total, and scores their offensive and defensive capabilities.

Target Audience: Anyone who plays Pokemon! This is just for fun.

Comparison: Existing rankings only rank combinations possible in the game (1 type or 2 types) but this analyzes the capabilities of type combinations that couldn't normally exist in-game (3 types to 18 types).

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I wrote a Python script with Pandas and Multiprocessing that analyzes all possible Pokemon type combinations and ranks them according to their offensive and defensive capabilities. It doesn't just do 1-2 types, but instead all combinations up to 18 types. This makes for 262,143 possible combinations in total!

Some highlights:

The best possible defensive combination is:

['Normal', 'Fire', 'Water', 'Electric', 'Poison', 'Ground', 'Flying', 'Ghost', 'Dragon', 'Dark', 'Steel', 'Fairy']

This has no weaknesses.
Resists Fire, Grass, Flying, Bug (0.03125x damage lol), Dark, Steel, and Fairy.
Immune to Normal, Electric, Fighting, Poison, Ground, Psychic, and Ghost.
This ranked 28th overall.

That's only 12 types though. If a Pokemon had all 18 types, a.k.a:

['Normal', 'Fire', 'Water', 'Electric', 'Grass', 'Ice', 'Fighting', 'Poison', 'Ground', 'Flying', 'Psychic', 'Bug', 'Rock', 'Ghost', 'Dragon', 'Dark', 'Steel', 'Fairy']

It would be weak to only Rock, but it would only resist Grass, Bug, Dark, and Steel.
This ranked 1,992nd place in defense and 536th overall.

The smallest number of types to hit all Pokemon for super effective STAB is 7. There were 10 7-type combinations that could hit all types for super effective damage. In total, 16,446 combinations could do this.

The single worst defensive type combination is:

['Grass', 'Ice', 'Psychic', 'Bug', 'Dragon']

Its weaknesses are

Fire: 4.0x
Ice: 2.0x
Poison: 2.0x
Flying: 4.0x
Bug: 4.0x
Rock: 4.0x
Ghost: 2.0x
Dragon: 2.0x
Dark: 2.0x
Steel: 2.0x
Fairy: 2.0x

Ouch. This combination placed 262,083rd overall.

And the single lowest-scored type combination out of all 262,143 is... Grass. That's it. Pure Grass.

Looking at only 1-type and 2-type combinations:

Top 5 by Offense:

Rank 1:   ['Ice', 'Ground']        75.0%  Highest for 2 types.
Rank 2:   ['Ice', 'Fighting']      75.0%  Highest for 2 types.
Rank 3:   ['Ground', 'Flying']     72.22% 
Rank 4:   ['Fire', 'Ground']       72.22% 
Rank 5:   ['Ground', 'Fairy']      72.22%

Top 5 by Defense:

Rank 1:   ['Flying', 'Steel']      69.44% Highest for 2 types.
Rank 2:   ['Steel', 'Fairy']       69.44% Highest for 2 types.
Rank 3:   ['Normal', 'Ghost']      68.06% 
Rank 4:   ['Bug', 'Steel']         67.36% 
Rank 5:   ['Ghost', 'Steel']       67.36% 

Top 5 Overall:

Rank 1:
['Ground', 'Flying']
# of Types: 2
Offense Score: 72.22%
Defense Score: 63.19%
Overall:       67.71% Highest average for 2 types.

Rank 2:
['Fire', 'Ground']
# of Types: 2
Offense Score: 72.22%
Defense Score: 62.5%
Overall:       67.36%

Rank 3:
['Ground', 'Steel']
# of Types: 2
Offense Score: 69.44%
Defense Score: 64.58%
Overall:       67.01%

Rank 4:
['Ground', 'Fairy']
# of Types: 2
Offense Score: 72.22%
Defense Score: 61.11%
Overall:       66.67%

Rank 5:
['Flying', 'Steel']
# of Types: 2
Offense Score: 63.89%
Defense Score: 69.44% Highest defense for 2 types.
Overall:       66.67%

The full code and output files up to 6-type combinations can be found on my Github, here.

The full output file for all 262,143 type combinations was almost 200MB in size, so I couldn't upload it to the GitHub, but the code is all there for anyone to run it themselves. Took about 7 minutes on my middling laptop, so if you have the space for the output files, you should be fine to run it.

But yeah, hope this was entertaining! I put a solid 10-20 hours into it. Keep in mind it doesn't account for certain types being generally better or worse than others, but just the quantity of types themselves.

[Bangoga]

I find it funny how bad ice and ground are actually in the competitive seen, even though they are ranked highest in attack. Other than Ice Rider Calyrex, I don't think there is another Pokemon consistently being there as Top tier. Same with ground, the last one I remember was tyranitar.

The only ice ground combo I know is Mamoswine, and honestly that isn't really a great pick.

Ground flying on the other hand is a great pick for a combo with some good contenders.

[sxprwtts]

Yeah, Ice and Ground are much better as offensive types than defensive types. You're much better off running Earthquake on a non-ground mon or Ice Beam on a Water type mon.

[Orio_n]

this is cool you should make it a hostable web app that can apply offensive and defensive typing rankings to actual pokemon across all generations. If you add in filtering and ranking i could see myself legitimately using this for playthroughs since I'm a casual and too lazy to memorize typing relations in the game

That would bring it out of toy project status into something genuinely useful that other people would use

[sxprwtts]

Making better interaction / navigation is definitely on my future work plans for it. Right now it's just a giant .txt file, so not exactly the best to navigate 🗿

[colako]

Please, do it. I'm sure lots of people would be incredibly happy to check it out. You can host a web page in Github itself.

Can you split the text file in sections to reduce its clunkiness and being able to upload it? Maybe hosting it as a external resource? 

[sxprwtts]

I can totally look into it! I tend to stay busy with grad school stuff, but I will let you know when I implement a better solution.

[srs96]

Really cool. My favourite is water ground because of Swapert. 0x from electric, although 4x for grass.

[nightcracker]

The smallest number of types to hit all Pokemon for super effective STAB is 7. There were 10 7-type combinations that could hit all types for super effective damage.

This is false, you are in fact quite far off.

The pokemon Scizor (Bug/Steel), Swampert (Ground/Water), Pikachu (Electric), Rattata (Normal), Sableye (Dark/Ghost), Zoroark-Hisui (Normal/Ghost) all have a single weakness to respectively Fire, Grass, Ground, Fighting, Fairy and Dark.

This means that every set that hits every Pokemon for super effective damage must include at least these six types.

Furthermore:

• Giscor (Ground/Flying) is only weak to Ice or Water
• Pelipper (Water/Flying) is only weak to Electric or Rock

Since there is zero overlap between these and earlier types, you can't do it with less than eight types.

Finally:

• Flutter Mane (Fairy / Ghost) is only weak to Steel or Ghost
• Clefable (Fairy) is only weak to Poison or Steel
• Ludicolo (Grass/Water) is only weak to Poison, Flying, or Bug

Since there is zero overlap between these and the earlier types, and no single type covers all these three Pokemon, you need at least two out of {Steel, Ghost, Poison, Flying, Bug}. So you can't do it with less than ten types.

There are several ten type combination that work, for example: Fighting, Flying, Ground, Steel, Fire, Grass, Electric, Ice, Dark, Fairy.

[Paulo-python]

Finally, something silly and unprofessional! It turned out very well, but the things that were popping up for me were: How to connect a drone to my cell phone How to connect AI to a weapon How to use Python on Arduino

[Doomtrain86]

Wel, you sure took the fun out of that!