HGG Community Forums

Thanks for the specific questions! This is a complex game, and I still ask questions, it is just good to know what we should go into first.

Q#1 Breeding Mixed Generations (Uneven Breeding):
This is a topic with many mixed feeling out there. You are correct, even breeding is breeding by generations (Gen one it completely made of created foundation horses, gen two is made up of horses where both parents were created foundations, gen three has horses where all grandparents are created foundations, etc.) Some people avoid even breeding because if done right the quality of your horses will go up far quicker than with incremental improvements with generation breeding, but this requires you get a very high quality horse that someone else bred (Usually a stallion, because you can expect that all the foals the gender of the far higher horse will be fixed if sent through free testing because free testing tells you if they are close to quality of the parent that gender, and they don't have a chance if the high quality parent is high enough, but they might make better show horses (I once bred a foundation to an evenly bred gen 6 to get a colt that was solidly generation 2 quality, so not the most impressive change all the time).
Others try to go for a higher intact foal ratio where they have a better basis to figure out the quality of their breeding horses (as the strategy I described above gives you practically solely mares for breeding and it is hardest to determine the quality of mares until at least seven real time months after they are born instead of being able to test right away with colts that is a real problem with extreme mixed generation breeding) Also people often don't like to rely as heavily of someone else's breeding for studs as someone else did the work, and everyone has different criteria for quality increase of each generation. Generation breeding helps have an equal(ish) intact foal and filly crop at the end of free testing and tells others what quality to expect from them by their pedigree when they are trying to decide if they should buy them and who to breed them to. With this you have to be careful that we are doing this for equal qualities, but everyone's lines are of different qualities (Especially at higher generations, or ow there are exceptional creates out there) so just because a horse is a certain generation doesn't mean that it equals your certain generation. You get a feel of which breeders breed closer to your standards after a little while.
Others go for a blend between the two, don't shun uneven, but usually with just one or two generations between parents instead of five or six, and then we try to guess what generation the uneven hors would match and then put it with those horses and greet it as if it were that generation. There are mistakes that get made, and sometimes I have to move mares several times to figure out how to get intact fillies and colts from them, and that loses possible breeding foals, but as I have so many evenly bred horses and horses that already are matched that the few I loose don't make much of a dent anymore. I also use this method, for if there is a horse I like, but I know it isn't the quality I want for that generation I send it to a lower generation that I think it would fit, such as a 5g colt I got from a sire who is now deceived, but the colt matches my 3g stallion in quality. The catch is, while I know that all his decendats from 3rd gen quality mares would be the quality of 4th gen even bred horses, buyers don't know that. They look at pedigrees and think they are somewhere between 6th and 4th gen quality, so they might put them with fifth gen horses with poor results, one of the reasons why people don't like buying uneven, because we want intact (breedable) foals, so it is best to mark horses with the generation quality. This strategy I could only make do with the testing available with a basic upgrade though, the horses I tried to do this with without the upgrade features ended up being stabs in the dark that more often than not were becoming worse in quality instead of better.
Also breeding uneven when you don't much about how the game works is very risky and often doesn't create desirable results. I lost several foals out of what to date is one of my two best mares early on because I was breeding her to a foundation quality stallion. I almost culled her so many times because I was reading about other breeders who cull mares with three or so fixed foals, and she only gave spayed fillies, she had to be a bad mare. The other day she tested blue at gen three, so now I am really glad I didn't cull her. Uneven breeding then gave me the wrong views of my herd and gave me lots of fixed horses and poor quality breeders, so uneven breeding should be done with caution. Sorry about the essay, complicated game. On to the next one...

Just saw that there is an updated lethality chart in the discussions tab. I'd suggest giving it a peek, especially if you like paint horses.