Pokemon GO Evolution and Lucky Egg Tips (Number-Crunching Included)

And yes.... I'm one of those rare fellas who is still playing Pokemon GO to this day, but you gotta understand... Pokemon was the BIGGEST anime of my childhood and I love every bit of it... even including the "spin-off", Digimon :P

Anyway, I've played to a point (not zealously though... just casually, whenever I'm out) where I've started crunching the numbers (because leveling past level 30 is tough AF!) and I thought you might like knowing some of these stuff :) Hope it helps!

So, if you play Pokemon GO, you probably have heard of this trick where you can maximize your XP gain by:

1. Filling your Pokemon bag with "extra", not-yet-evolved Pokemon (Pokemon that you can transfer without hesitating); 

Examples: Pidgey, Sentret, Weedle, Venonat... etc Any Pokemon that you can easily catch tons of, and that you have tons of expandable candies to evolve.

2. Using a Lucky Egg which will double all XP gained within 30 mins; and 
3. Evolving the heck out of all these extras

This trick obviously work best with Pokemon that you have not discovered the evolved version yet (if that makes sense) since you'll also be doubling the "New Pokemon Discovery" bonus XP, but it's a bit of a win-lose situation though since not everyone has a ton of Pokemon that they have not discovered the evolved version of.

NOTE: You will get 500 XP per evolved Pokemon and 1000 for every newly-discovered evolved Pokemon, so if you have a Lucky Egg on, you will get 1000 and 2000 respectively instead.

Anyway, I did a 30-min experiment just now and I calculated (approximately) how many total XP you can get if you really make full use of the Lucky Egg time that you have. Take note that I didn't have a single new Pokemon discovery during any of these evolutions... just for the sake of the experiment.

Here are some of the stuff I use to help me keep track of the time
- A list of Pokemon that I wanted to evolve just for the XP written down on  a piece of paper so I know which Pokemon I want to evolve and which I want to keep unevolved


Here are some of the rules that I follow during the experiment:
- I did not waste any time transferring any evolved Pokemon
- The Pokemon list is set to A-Z for easy navigating
- I exited from my Pokemon list screen at the 20th minute and at the 29th minute just to make sure that the XP is credited to my character (You can choose to do this only once to save a bit of time, but it can be risky coz you need to exit the screen while your Lucky Egg is still in effect to get the Double XP bonus)
- I also tapped the screen during each evolution in hopes that it'll speed things up - it didn't, really.


Okay, so here are the results:

1. First round
- Time: 20 mins
- Evolved: 50 Pokemon
- Total XP Gained: 50k

2. Second Round
- Time: 9-10 mins (might have wasted a min here because I ran out of extras to evolve. Spend a bit of time scrolling through the Pokemon list)

- Evolved: 23 (might be able to squeeze 1 or 2 more in if I hadn't wasted the 1 min)

- Total XP Gained: 23k

3. IN TOTAL
- Time: 30 mins
- Evolved: 73-74
- Total XP Gained: 73k

4. POTENTIAL TOTAL (if you do everything just right)
- Time: 30 mins
- Evolved: 73 - 75
- Total XP Gained: 73k - 75k

So from this little experiment, you now know that you'll need to prepare at least 75 extra Pokemon for this XP-milking purpose.


Update 17/7/18:
I did another experiment just now and I managed to squeeze in even more evolutions per 30 mins of Lucky Egg time. This was what I got:
- Time: 30 mins
- Evolved: 73 (normal evo) PLUS 3 new evos
- Total XP Gained: 79k

Extra details
- The game takes around 20 seconds per normal evolution.


You're welcome! :) Let me know if this helped ya!


P/S: Don't waste Lucky Egg time by catching Pokemon. You'll be wasting precious seconds waiting for the Pokemon to finally stop twitching in the Pokeball (there's a trick you can do to skip this but it takes plenty of practice) and frankly, you just can't beat the doubled XP that an evolved Pokemon (especially a new discovery) gives.

HOWEVER, if you're using a lucky egg during an event where the Catch XP is doubled or tripled, then catch away!