I played the game for a while but have stopped now except to check once in a long. I figured the end game, other than trying to catch them all, is battling and controlling gyms. I guessed that as the most valuable game currency (akin to the "magic stones" PAD) are given from controlling a gym for a set amount of time. However, I don't like the battle mechanics as it is mostly just rapid tapping on your Pokemon. It definitely does not have the depth of the handheld Pokemon Games are even competitive and have world tournaments. The game has made me interested in Pokemon again though and I went back to try to complete Pokemon White for the DS.
I might pick up the game more if they improve the battling system but I highly doubt so. Here are some tips and links I picked up while researching about the game. I don't use any illegal methods like apps to tell you spawn locations or location spoofers:
- Level 25 player's comprehensive guide from Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/pokemongo/comments/4tgrqw/hi_i_just_hit_level_25_and_wrote_a_comprehensive/. Probably something all players should read first
- Player Levelling: If you searched around, you'll find the common tip to store lots of Pidgeys, Caterpies and Weedles along with their candies to mass evolve them during a Lucky Egg activation. However, I remember reading a guide that actually adds that you should time the Lucky Egg with your 10KM egg hatching to maximise your gains even further!
The tip is that you store all your level rewards' egg incubators (especially if you do not IAP) to wait till you have a few 10KM eggs, then incubate them together. That guide mentions that you can then incubate any more 5KM eggs at the 5KM incubation mark of the 10KM eggs to stack more. Once you are less than 1KM from hatching, activate the Lucky Egg and walk around while doing the usual mass Pidgeys and co evolution. I think you need to check back to the main screen once in a while to see if there is any hatching available and also to get your rewards as it is common to level up more than once; I skipped a level and didn't get any rewards notification and I wasn't sure if the rewards still went into my bag. I'm guessing the game only checks those at the main screen.
I think the UI for this lucky egg usage should have been improved further as players are mostly evolving in Pokemon list screen and your timer for the Lucky Egg isn't shown there. I do not like this Lucky Egg maximisation technique although it is necessary for efficiency because it forces me to be locked into the game fully for 30 minutes. It reminds me of the 1 hour stoning of the Guerrilla dungeons in PAD.
- Pokemon Go Best Move list: http://heavy.com/games/2016/07/pokemon-go-move-guide-tier-list-best-moves-each-type-species-ranking-dps-damage-per-second/. I refer to this website for a while and it is one of the top deciding factor in letting you know which Pokemon to keep out of its duplicates. The next deciding factor will be the hidden IV stats which I write about in the next point below.
- Pokemons have hidden IV stats which means some are better than others. This "feature" has been in Pokemon games for a while and if you play those competitively, you'll know about it. Before the update to add appraisal from your team leaders, you actually had to use a calculator to check it. I used https://pokeassistant.com/main/ivcalculator a lot but it can get confusing. I didn't like using it because in order to get accurate results, you had to feed it candy and then recalculate to narrow down the outcome. I find it counterintuitive especially when trying to determine which Magikarp is the best while slowing down my progress in evolving it because I'm using up the candies required to evolve while checking!
Beware of those calculators that intercept your app data to the game servers as those are very convenient but can cause your account to get banned. The new appraisal feature is great to mitigate all the inconvenience in having to go out of the game to a 3rd party app or site to get info. PAD still has a little bit of this issue. If I'm not mistaken, the newer Pokemon games on consoles also have an NPC that appraise your Pokemon to let you know about the IV stats.
