TL;DR I created a simulation of the OU “environment” and calculated which Pokemon would outcompete the rest in a survival of the fittest competition, data is in links in the text below (results are both expected and surprising!). Hope you guys find it as interesting as I do

Hi everyone!

I’m taking a population dynamics course in college right now, and while my mind was drifting, I thought about a cool scenario. What if all OU viable Pokemon were in the wild, “OU environment”, and fought each other to extinction? Who would win? I don’t think this has been done before, so I decided to try it out.

I’m not the best programmer, but I tried to use all the resources I could. First, I used all 267 OU Pokemon sets recommended by Smogon, and created a 267x267 damage matrix where each entry was the most amount of damage each mon can deal to another using Honko’s damage calculator. Conveniently, it already takes into consideration the damage augmenting effects of items and abilities (like LO, Tough Claws, etc.). I decided to make Choice Band and Choice Specs Pokemon to instead have Life Orb, because otherwise these sets are too OP. Then I got all relevant data needed such as speed and stuff.

Every Pokemon started with 1 member of their “species” (where each species was a different moveset). I would randomly choose 2 species from the OU environment and they would fight. The winner gains a member in their population, and the loser loses a member in their population. I then repeated this process until only one species remained. The results were fairly shocking!

Here is an example of one simulation. You can see the graphs of all the Pokemon population numbers, with the last 5 being Mega Swampert, Mega Metagross (All-Out Attacker), Kyurem-B (Choice Scarf), Mega Aggron, and Mega Charizard X (All-Out Attacker). Once Mega Aggron died out, notice how Kyurem-B always wins the 1 on 1 match up with Mega Swampert and quickly wins out as the victor.

After running the simulation 1,000 times, here is my table of summary data, which includes Winning percentage, Top 3 percentage (percentage of games that a Pokemon reaches the top 3), and Win/Top3 percentage (if top 3 is made, how often do you take the crown)? I think that the results were pretty surprising. Mega Swampert (UU and without rain) won 22% of the time, and Mega Aggron (another UU pokemon) came in 5th place with a 7% winning percentage. But at the same time, if you look at the top Pokemon, I can see why Mega Swampert does so well, defeating 6 of the other 9 Pokemon in the top ten. I found it particularly amusing that Bronzong (Trick Room Support) made it to the top 3 once, out of 1000 simulations.

Here are some disclaimers: I did not program any non-damaging moves (Swords Dance, Dragon Dance, Will-O-Wisp, Roost, etc.) nor priority effects (RIP Talonflame, Bisharp). This is just because I don’t really know how :/, and extensively used the damage calculator instead. Although, maybe you could make the argument that wild Pokemon wouldn’t really use non-attacking moves anyway, idk. Thus, all-out attackers are naturally favored, and stall pokes die.

Is this analysis of any use for competitive battling? Probably not really- 1v1 matchups are rarely that important in a 6v6 singles setting. But I thought it would be cool to see which Pokemon would win out in the wild!

Feel free to post questions or comments; if there’s any interest, I might do another run with other environments (UU, Ubers, etc.)