3rd Gen Battle Palace Help+Discussion Thread!

Hi all! I've recently developed an interest in the Frontier's Battle Palace! For those who don't know, the Palace works as follows:

The player does not control the mons sent out in the Palace. Instead, the mons battle on their own, with RNG determining which moves they use.

Every move is categorized as either attack, defense, or support. The chance of a given mon using a certain category of move depends on its nature, and whether the mon is at <50% HP at the start of the turn.

For the full move list and probability table, see the Bulbapedia entry here.

Have you ever tried it before? Do you have any interesting sets that you think might work well? Let's hear it!

I'll kick us off with some singles sets I've cooked up. I unfortunately don't have access to my copy of Emerald atm, but once I get it, I'll beat it post-haste and start testing out my ideas!

My thought process when building these mons was as follows:

Since there are no 0% chances for any move category, and rolling a move category that the mon lacks results in doing nothing for a turn, every mon should have at least one move of each category.

Personally, I decided on a basic formula of either dual STABs or STAB/coverage, and one of each of defense and support. The defense category contains a lot of good setup moves, which is what I've leaned toward, and the support category is kind of a grab bag of status moves, so I just browsed the list until I found something that worked well (enough) with the rest of the set in question.

Without futher ado, the sets:

Snorlax @ Leftovers
Ability: Immunity
EVs: 252 HP / 252 Atk / 4 Def
Adamant Nature
IVs: 0 Spe
- Body Slam
- Shadow Ball
- Curse (Defense)
- Amnesia (Support)

Adamant probabilities (>50%):
Attack::: 38%
Defense: 31%
Support: 31%

Adamant probabilities (<50%):
Attack::: 70%
Defense: 15%
Support: 15%

This set is all about walling long enough to set up Curses and wreck things. The combination of Amnesia, Curse, Immunity, Leftovers, and potential parahax makes this set very forgiving against bad RNG. Even if it gets several bad rolls in a row (like using Amnesia after hitting max SpD or attacking on an immunity), it'll likely stick around long enough for its luck to turn around.

It seems this set's greatest weaknesses are its offensive coverage and weakness to statuses other than poison. Steel types are gonna take a LOT of setup to blow past, and both ghost and normal types have a 50% chance of getting hit with an immunity. Depending on how common normal types are in the Palace, I might swap Shadow Ball with something else, and just hope that whatever it is will be enough to break past ghost types before they get a chance to W-o-W me.
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Alakazam @ Lum Berry
Ability: Synchronize
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Hasty Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Psychic
- Ice Punch
- Calm Mind (Defense)
- Disable (Support)

Hasty probabilities (>50%):
Attack::: 58%
Defense: 37%
Support: 5%

Hasty probabilities (<50%):
Attack::: 88%
Defense: 6%
Support: 6%

Hasty offers three major advantages for this set. One, it focuses heavily on attacking right out of the gate, which is what Zam is best at. Two, it has minimal chances to use Disable, which is mostly filler on this set. Three, it does all of this while allowing Zam to maintain max speed.

Synchronize will hopefully somewhat mitigate Lax's status weakness. If Lax dies to something that crippled it with status, Zam will be able to reflect it back, maintain its own health with Lum, and take advantage of the opponent's status to get some fairly painless setup.

Since both of the types that hit dark types super effectively are physical, I just threw Ice Punch on here for general coverage.

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Houndoom @ Sitrus Berry
Ability: Flash Fire
EVs: 4 HP / 252 SpA / 252 Spe
Hasty Nature
IVs: 0 Atk
- Crunch
- Flamethrower
- Double Team (Defense)
- Will-O-Wisp (Support)

Hasty once again for the same reasons as above.

Houndoom is my last-ditch effort against steel types that give both Lax and Zam trouble. Double Team for maximum hax, W-o-W for the occasional burn. Flash Fire over Early Bird since I'm willing to bet fire attacks are more common than sleep in the Palace. Sitrus is my attempt at keeping it above 50% long enough to get one or two Double Teams in.

I just sort of threw this set together after a bit of brainstorming about how to deal with steels, so I'm definitely open to potential replacements.

I've seen tactics of Pok?mon with only two or three offensive attacks so that the chance of the Pok?mon choosing the right attack would increase. I want to tackle on the entire Frontier sometime but the Palace is probably my final destination because it needs an entirely different way of team building. I think these movesets are good for all the Frontier facilities, actually.

BlazingCobaltX said:

I've seen tactics of Pok?mon with only two or three offensive attacks so that the chance of the Pok?mon choosing the right attack would increase.

Click to expand...

Yeah, that seems like a pretty necessary way to go about it. I could see forgoing one of the other categories in the case of a really low-chance nature (like, I might drop the support moves entirely on one of my hasty mons and just pray to RNGesus that I don't get too many support rolls.)

BlazingCobaltX said:

I want to tackle on the entire Frontier sometime but the Palace is probably my final destination because it needs an entirely different way of team building. I think these movesets are good for all the Frontier facilities, actually.

Click to expand...

Thanks! I agree that the Lax set is p good as-is, and I might use it elsewhere, but I'll probably just start from scratch as far as teambuilding goes, since this team wasn't really built with a ton of synergy (no real point to it when you can't switch at will).