>>58549350Every gym past 2, and team leader, rival battle, ect should have 6 pokemon. No excuses. Even at 2 is an admission your wild pokemon availability is so dogshit, that you can't expect the player to have a balanced team by then, and needs to be able to win by numbers (though you CAN still use this productively by giving them a very high stat pokemon the player couldn't have yet).
More custom ai packages for trainers. Most trainers run on, more or less, the same AI package they have since Gen 3, that being mostly rng, with a vague awareness of going for kills. There is zero excuse for a gym leader, team leader, or other significant fight to not have a custom package, built with their team in mind.
With the above in mind, most significant opponents should be given SOME way of dealing with the most common player cheese. Most teams need some form of priority, some form of defensive choke to survive 1 hit, always, a way to phase, and a way to set up. These things are useless without the ai to use them appropriately.
This should be enough for most purposes. More than this, is reserved for actually challenging hacks and such. This is the bare minimum required to make the games not complete snoozefests, that you actually need to prepare for.
If you're shit, you can still overlevel, and the player always has the advantage of tailoring a team for what's in front of them. This is just enough to not be able to coast through the game on a starter and 5 random shitmons, 2 of which only see use to revive the starter.