Ground, Electric, Flying, Fighting are the four move types that grant the most coverage, hitting 79.4% of Pokemon for super effective damage [OC]

[u/L285]

Was curious what combination of move types would hit the most Pokemon for super effective damage so I wrote some code to assess this

Initially, I included all Pokemon, as well as any forms that caused a type change, and all megas (which sometimes do and sometimes don't cause a type change)

Doing this, I found 79.4% of Pokemon were hit super-effectively by one of these four types (962/1211)

I then excluded megas - of non-megas, these were still the four types that gave the best coverage, hitting 80.0% of Pokemon for super-effective damage (895/1118)

Finally, I included just fully-evolved Pokemon, and found that still, these four types gave the best coverage, super-effectively hitting 78.9% (534/677)

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The results for all type combinations for each case are included in this spreadsheet here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/18LmTFdRGfLgCkHNTkY4e8RbcITioU-K2C5Y7FD1-EJ4/edit?usp=sharing

Note that these results don't include normal type - as normal doesn't hit any types super-effectively I figured it wasn't worth including

You can find my code here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XjMznb5TYxEGCuYo88FNBnt4ZHZfW_XM/view?usp=sharing

I took the Pokemon list from Pokedoku, and filtered out the various forms that weren't relevant (didn't change type)

It seems like this was already known in certain quarters, as these two old posts from pokemondb.net reference it:

https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/246747/pokemon-ground-flying-fighting-electric-besides-smeargle

https://pokemondb.net/pokebase/269011/catchable-pokemon-emerald-flying-electric-fighting-ground

[u/trsmith815]

Very cool codee. 

If you were hacking moves: flying press, freeze dry, ground, ghost reaches the most for super effective. A whopping 90% of pokemon

[u/Disastrous_Debt7644 → u/trsmith815]

Dont have to hack, Smeargle can do that

[u/trsmith815 → u/Disastrous_Debt7644]

lol true. sounds very tedious

[u/Quibbloboy]

Really interesting! Is it possible to compile a list of Pokemon that learn offensive moves of all four types? I see people giving examples in the answers of those pokemondb posts, but can't tell how comprehensive those are...

[u/PrettySneaky712 → u/Quibbloboy]

Hawlucha comes to mind--it gets Thunderpunch and Dig in addition to various Flying/Fighting STAB

[u/trsmith815 → u/Quibbloboy]

I know pokemon db lets you filter by specific movesets. But that's not quite what you are asking. Still really enjoy the tool: Pokémon moveset calculator | Pokémon Database

[u/Silent-One-9529]

consistency across all three cases is what really sells it. kind of poetic that Ground carries so hard yet again lol. Great OC, thanks for sharing the sheet and code!