For a game that basically everyone in the world is currently playing, there's an awful lot about Pokémon Go that's still unknown. Chief of these are the hidden stats that dictate exactly how powerful your little PokéPals are, and the chances they'll have of coming out top in a gruelling PokéFight during play.
Thanks to the combined field researching powers of the thousands-strong Silph Road Reddit group, however, some of Pokémon Go's more elusive mysteries are starting to be revealed. As you can see in the video below, the group has discovered that each Pokémon has three fixed base stats – attack, defence and stamina – which determine their relative merits in battle.
While a Pokémon's attack and defence stats are largely self-explanatory, that stamina stat – represented by the blue series of squares beneath your Pokémon's name during battle – is a little more curious. Stamina dictates how quickly your Pokémon is able to initiate a special attack once a fight commences, and the Silph Road has collated comparative stamina data for each pokémon too.
These stats innately make some Pokémon more effective than others, no matter how much they've been powered up – and you can see how each Pokémon compares to its compadres by scoping out the Silph Road's remarkably comprehensive, and supremely helpful Pokémon Go website. If nothing else, it'll give you a better idea of which Pokémon you should be saving your stardust for.
There are other complex systems hiding beneath the game's cheery exterior too: each Pokémon move appears to have its own subset of attributes – power, type, duration and damage window – making battling even more involved. Of particular note is the final attribute, damage window, which, the Silph Road theorises, is the duration in which moves are able to inflict damage on an opponent.
Quick attacks, the group suggests, can inflict damage for 200 milliseconds, while a Pokémon's standard dodge last 500 milliseconds. As you can probably deduce, that means that a well-timed dodge should be able to avoid all quick attacks.
Special attacks, however, are a different matter entirely. Some appear to place their 200 millisecond damage window midway through their (potentially much longer) attack animation, while other special attacks last more than 500 milliseconds - meaning several successive dodges are required to avoid them. All this is discussed in more detail in the video above, and makes for fascinating viewing.
This isn't the first time the Silph Road has group-sourced a whole lot of illuminating Pokémon Go data. You can see the results of its research into the (many, many) factors influencing Pokémon spawns below.
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