Of course I realize I slipped up with the Safari Zone mechanics only after I put it up and not in the month it took to make it. Oh, well. I'd made the script I put up yesterday on the assumption that the run check happens before the counters are decremented, but it's actually after, which means the state used for the run check is the same as on the following player turn (which, confusingly, doesn't necessarily match up with the "Wild [Pokémon] is angry/eating!" message shown just before it). With this correction to the script, bait is officially never useful at all ever, even for Magikarp and Poliwag. Joy.

I also did rewrite basically the entire mechanical explanation to be a bit clearer and more detailed about the whole process, and overall I'm a lot more satisfied with it than yesterday.

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Right, so somehow most of my free time in April mysteriously vanished, but here is the real R/B/Y Safari Zone Mechanics section, as promised. It probably looks underwhelming for all the time it took, because I ended up cutting basically half of what I initially wrote for it and the script had all kinds of weird bugs and performance issues and so on and so on and so on, but it has a calculator you can play with and it has way too many overelaborate strategies even though they're almost always inferior to the simplest possible one, so I hope it's at least somewhat fun.

I want to basically rewrite the whole mechanical explanation part right now, but I need to be in bed three hours ago and it should be mostly understandable. Will probably make edits tomorrow. I'll likely just add the other generations' Safari mechanics to that page - they're not nearly as interesting, so they'll probably not warrant separate pages of their own - but either way, it won't hurt to put it up in this form. Especially since as it happens this is to my knowledge the first proper analysis of how the Safari Zone works in R/B/Y (there is a vague explanation on Bulbapedia, but it's both vague and actually wrong about some crucial details), while the others are pretty well understood already.

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