[Battle] Difficulty balancing and double battle team composition

A couple of years ago I made Pokémon Emerald: Double Edition, which has been fairly well received, but has some problems, and something a lot of people bring up is balance, the level curve being very high and grinding being required.

I'm now developing Pokémon Double USUM (an alpha is ready up to Hala which will be posted shortly) and I am really interested in keeping a difficult level curve but not having it be too frustrating.

I'd really like tips! In my opinion it's not engaging unless there are fairly frequent moments where you're evenly matched against the opponent and are at least a little bit at risk of wiping out, but I'm really interested in what people think about this

I'd also appreciate any help with doubles team comp-ing, for the CPUs. It's all good looking up competitive combinations for endgame stuff but getting the first few trainers to be interesting but not unfair is something I'm trying to get right.

Because of all this I'm going to be releasing alphas for everyone to test and give feedback on, so when I post about it I'd really appreciate feedback too.

If any of you want to discuss this further than in this thread, feel free to join my Pokémon Double Versions discord: https://discord.gg/ZrNAy5V