Couple of newbie questions related to leveling and evolving

[Chocolicious]

Hello fellow Poké-masters,

 

I've got a couple of questions regarding the game so far. I've played about 10 hours now, got a couple of Pokémon (average level 30) and I'm having a really great time.

 

A few questions though:

 

1) If I evolve a Squirtle in to a Wartortle at level 18. Will it take Wartortle longer to get to, for instance, level 30 than it would take that unevolved Squirtle?

 

2) Building upon question 1, if this is indeed the case: How do I know when the best time to evolve my Pokémon is, assuming I want to level most efficiently?

 

3) I sometimes find an evolved version of a Pokémon underneath the original Pokémons evolve level. Example: in a cave I visited, I found a Sandshrew and a Sandslash that were roughly level 13. Does that mean if I catch the Sandslash (which is the evolved version of Sandshrew, I believe) that leveling Sandslash is slower than Sandshrew?

 

I'd love to hear your feedback on these questions, I might have a couple more later on.

 

Chocolicious.

[Crimefridge]

Currently, evolving gives you a significant experience penalty. Catching an evolved pokemon will have the same issue.

 

If you have one evolution, you can put it off until when you reach level 100. If you have two evolutions, you can put it off until you reach 99, evolve, then reach 100, evolve.

 

Certain pokemon, like Eevee, can't learn moves without evolving. However, if you are willing to pay for the move relearner you can learn all those moves later and wait to evolve Eevee on 100 or after 100 depending on which evolution.

 

This effectively neuters the exp of certain pokemon that you need to evolve to make use out of them, like Magikarp, Eevee, and to some degree Abra.

 

Especially with Magikarp, because Magikarp is listed as "Slow" at gaining exp which means it requires a lot of EXP to begin with compared to others.

[Chocolicious]

120146 Currently, evolving gives you a significant experience penalty. Catching an evolved pokemon will have the same issue.

 

If you have one evolution, you can put it off until when you reach level 100. If you have two evolutions, you can put it off until you reach 99, evolve, then reach 100, evolve.

 

Certain pokemon, like Eevee, can't learn moves without evolving. However, if you are willing to pay for the move relearner you can learn all those moves later and wait to evolve Eevee on 100 or after 100 depending on which evolution.

 

This effectively neuters the exp of certain pokemon that you need to evolve to make use out of them, like Magikarp, Eevee, and to some degree Abra.

 

Especially with Magikarp, because Magikarp is listed as "Slow" at gaining exp which means it requires a lot of EXP to begin with compared to others.

 

Thank you for taking the time to answer to my post.

 

Am I right in deducing that different Pokémons gain experience at a different rate, even without evolving? That's new to me!

[Cjlj]

In normal pokemon games, pokemon are sorted into 5 different leveling groups. Each leveling group uses a different formula to determine how much XP it requires to reach each level.

 

 

You can find out what group a pokemon is in from its Bulbapedia page.

 

In this game, it seems like there is a very large bug or oversight with the code that means the pokemon's base experience yield is a factor to determine experience requirement. So Squirtle's base yield is 63 and Wartortle's is 142 and so Wartortle will require roughly 2.25x more XP to level up once evolved.

 

My advice is you will want to evolve your pokemon if possible when playing through the game, because the Gym battles are tuned really high and you will need the extra stats to beat them. If you are grinding up a low level pokemon to catch up with your team, don't evolve them until they catch up with your team because it will go a lot faster.

 

The other thing to keep in mind, is that evolved pokemon learn moves at different levels, and in some cases the evolved forms won't be able to learn moves that the prevelutions do. If you level up a prevolution you will able to learn the moves the evolved form missed by visiting a move relearner, but evolved pokemon can not relearn moves that only the prevolution forms learn. This mainly affects pokemon that evolve using stones rather than leveling. If you check Bulbapedia you can see that Arcanine can only learn 5 moves total, so if you evolve Growlithe before learning its best moves like Flare Blitz, you're in trouble.