1st Gen Strategic Battling in 1st Gen Games.

I'm interested to know what sort of Strategies people use in competitive battling with the 1st-gen games like Red, Blue/Green, and Yellow, where there's no such thing as EVs, hold-items or Abilities.

How is it possible to have a strategy in those games that doesn't rely on just Movesets?

~Thanks.

Remember that special isn't split so you can load special attacks on lots of Pokemon.

where there's no such thing as EVs

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I'm suprized people think this! RBY isn't some primitive technology ;)

RBY has EVs! Vitamins were available back then.

Problem back then was teams including Dragonite, Mewtwo, Moltres, Articuno, Zapdos and Alakazam...

ahh, you're right! for some reason I thought that EVs had only been introduced in RSE.
are you sure though? How come I never heard of mention of them back then?
Well... maybe it was the fact that I was only nine years old, but I had loads of Guides and stuff and I'd never heard of them. I just thought that Vitamins were extra boosts that you could add to your stats ;P

oh! I'm wrong!

The last time I looked this up on bulbapedia it said what I said above...

bulbapedia said:

In Generation I and Generation II games, vitamins increased a stat by a single point, with a maximum of ten of each vitamin which could be given to a Pokémon.

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source

It's only after generation two that vitamins contributed to effort values! I'm so sorry for misleading you.

it's ok!
I had a feeling that was it, seeing as I'd never heard of EVs before playing Ruby. Is there such thing as IVs in RBY? Because if there isn't, then it is pretty much completely down to movesets, which would be pretty hard to excel at.

Thanks for looking it up for me!

I don't wanna reply like it's definite now! ;)

Nowhere is it written explicitly. Although I think they are. I remember an NPC saying that the same Pokemon can be equivalently levelled but with differing stats. I think that was in Fuchsia.

The bulbapedia article implies that they were introduced in RBY since its section is blank. Generation II (GSC) states that the games added an additional usage of IVs beside statistics.
Bulbapedia article

Side note, but to back up the fact that EVs were around, yes, EVs existed in Gen I, but back then, they were called Stat Exp. Proof of this lies in the existence of the Box Trick, where after battling a bunch of a single species of Pokemon (Pikachu for example), you deposit your Pokemon into Bill's PC and immediately withdraw it again to have stats recalculated according to how much Stat Exp the Pokemon you've battled gave out. (You can actually still do this, as stats, if I recall correctly, are still recalculated every time you withdraw Pokemon as well as every time you level up.)

You can find out more about how the trick works here, which probably goes into better detail about it than I could. ^_^;

If I recall correctly, though, there were less restrictions on how much Stat Exp a Pokemon could learn (Don't quote me on this part.), although the very most you could boost your Pokemon's stats might've been the individual species' maximum possible stats. Four Stat Exp points still went to one stat point either way. Additionally, stat boosters worked the same way they do now by adding Stat Exp to a Pokemon's stats, according to the stat booster it consumed.

And yes, DVs (now called IVs) existed too.

Thanks for the in-depth info, I couldn't have asked for a better answer, and I didn't realised that the first-gen games were that advanced!

Ahh! The box trick. I completely forgot about that.

Thanks for a good post, Jax Malcolm, maybe I'm not so wrong afterall.

Followed this link from your link Malcolm and it shows the clear increase of stats from the box trick and this one explains it directly (although the screenshots don't load).

Does Colbert refer to the Colbert Report?