[Balance] Clarify friendship

[Tempo-anon]

Clarify the requirements needed for friendship gain, which primarily concern evolutions as well as happiness moves. Happiness as an evolutionary mechanic is primarily an annoyance for players because it makes using starters that evolve by it harder while being a non-issue in the mid-late game because all happiness evos will already be fully evolved in the wild. Its mechanics also usually force a player to use a Pokemon, making certain Pokemon completely impractical for challenges. Operating under the assumption that happiness will be disconnected from a metaprogression aspect, here are a couple of thoughts I have.

• There should be two tiers of evolution, one for baby Pokemon, and one for nonbaby Pokemon. We can use the friendship cutoffs of 160 (gen 8/9) and 220 (gen 2-7)
• Most Pokemon start with 50 base friendship. This means a baby needs +110 friendship to evolve, and other Pokemon need +170 friendship to evolve. We should discuss how many floors/levels that should be equivalent to. As of right now, the enemy evolve level for friendship evos are set at 15/25.
• All Pokemon in the party should gain friendship as a player progresses. In the mainline games, on average a player's Pokemon gain +1 friendship every 256 steps. Need to decide how much friendship per floor/biome/etc
• Pokemon losing friendship when they faint is an annoyance, but I think it is a neat mechanic that offers some risk/reward if we also incentivize a player by awarding more friendship if a Pokemon participates in battle

ref: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Friendship

[PigeonBar]

A couple thoughts so far:

• Friendship evolutions occurring near level 25 might be a bit too low, specifically because of Zubat, which evolves into Golbat at level 22 and can then evolve via friendship into Crobat very quickly afterward.
• I've wanted to increase friendship gained from Rare Candies (and decrease friendship from other sources), so that the player has to pay attention to a specific party member in order to raise its friendship. Unfortunately, based on playtesting, this idea might not work due to Rare Candies spawning too infrequently in earlier waves with 0 Golden Poke Balls.
• It could make sense for the "walk 1000 steps" evolutions (Pawmot, Rabsca, Brambleghast) to also be turned into friendship evolutions.

[Tempo-anon]

Friendship evolutions occurring near level 25 might be a bit too low, specifically because of Zubat, which evolves into Golbat at level 22 and can then evolve via friendship into Crobat very quickly afterward.

I think this is just an unfortunate case where some Pokemon want to evolve earlier around that time (Buneary/Munchlax/Riolu/Woobat) but then there are others that can get by much longer (Golbat/Chansey). We can definitely tweak that 25 ballpark to something like the 30s

I've wanted to increase friendship gained from Rare Candies (and decrease friendship from other sources), so that the player has to pay attention to a specific party member in order to raise its friendship. Unfortunately, based on playtesting, this idea might not work due to Rare Candies spawning too infrequently in earlier waves with 0 Golden Poke Balls.

We can always create a new item reward that specifically boosts friendship and either does nothing else or just gives a small amount of exp if the goal is for players to specifically focus on friendship gain at the expense of taking other item rewards

It could make sense for the "walk 1000 steps" evolutions (Pawmot, Rabsca, Brambleghast) to also be turned into friendship evolutions.

I was initially thinking something like "carry them on your team for X waves" would be the best approach to translating that, but since friendship is now gained through waves traveled, I think friendship can also be a good metric.