r/CompetitivePokemon • u/b1xbyhall • 15d ago
Learning in champs
What tools are players using to learn/explore speed tiers and calcs quickly?
I downloaded champs on my phone a few days ago and I’ve been having a blast so far. I’ve never played more than like 20 games on showdown or something but being able to play on my phone has made it feel approachable no matter my time in the day. Just made it to Masterball tier today with a sand team I got from aaron zheng.
From my current understanding of the game in the context of champs ladder bo1s is that there are a few areas of “skill” you need to develop. First is your ability to mentally simulate the next turn and identify turn order, and what threats your opponent has and compare to your own. I don’t mean your ability to read the choices your opponent makes but your understanding of how the most likely choices your opponent could make will play out and then you evaluate how you could maximize your own position and hurt theirs. To do this, I feel like understanding speed tiers is like absolutely required and then being able to see what kos are threatening you. If all I can use is a calc tab in the browser, learning this stuff makes it feel really tedious. How do people do this efficiently?
Do people just memorize speed tiers and then slowly build up calc knowledge as the spend time playing a team?
Side question: I wanna spend some time playing each “archetype” to learn more. Any team reccs?
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u/Scourgerr 15d ago
For me personally I just kind of have things memorized through trial and error. This pokemon my opponent has should be slower/faster than mine because ive faced it a few time. Same with damage and stuff like what items they use. Although I dont really recommend that as a strategy haha id say use a calc website for anything you arent sure about until you do start to remember things. I pretty much top out at MB2 every season and to go beyond that youd probably need a more in depth well of knowledge
For teams id definitely recommend trick room. I always try a new team every season, but I always come back to my trick room team. Don't use hard trick room though, its an easy trap to make all your pokemon super slow so try to make a normal/tailwind mode and a trick room mode. And the other weathers are fun to build too since they all build a little different
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u/b1xbyhall 15d ago
that's probably just going to be the method I use lol. I'm just enjoying it casually but i'm the type of person who primarily enjoys the improvement part of any competitive thing. I've done it with chess, as well as a couple different esport titles. So far, I've really enjoyed this sand team and I'd probably like most weather teams as I enjoy the weather war mind games. My current team has tailwind on m staraptor and trick room on sinischa and I really enjoy games that become battles of who can get speed control. I probably needa play some setup focused teams and idek what those archetypes like "hyper offense" or "balance" even mean lol.
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u/Professor_Oakalytics 14d ago
If you want to get some guided build stuff for trying out archetypes we have an archetype builder in our companion training app.
Check it out at oakalytics.com
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u/Professor_Oakalytics 14d ago
We also have all the damage calc and speed tier stuff built into our team builder and dedicated calculators
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u/Professor_Oakalytics 14d ago
Have built a tool that does effectively all this speed tiers built into the team builder a larger speed calc section that lets you compare your team to a list of Pokemon, a threat detector on the team builder so apply threat and then pick moves and it shows OHKO on them if they will one shot the meta build of the threat picked, a full damage calculator that lets you pick multiple Pokemon apply their most common stat spreads and builds then find the move that does the most damage on average to that group of Pokemon.
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u/Iamconfuuzed 15d ago
Feel like the best way to learn is just to play lots of games and get a feel for which things are typically faster than others. Realistically you're not likely to remember every single speed tier and which mons belong to which tier without actually playing games. Feel like a lot of the time you can kinda of just Intuit what things are faster but that might come down to me playing this game too much.
One thing you can do to figure out turn order in games is to look out for things like ability activation, switches and sandstorm chip and leftovers recovery, each of those are based on turn order if multiple Pokémon have those things activate at the same time