HGG Community Forums

1. Yes, with somewhat of a caveat. An A papered stallion will have better breeding ability than a B papered stallion, but if the A papered stallion is worse than the parents but the B papered stallion is better than the parents, then the B papered will be better for his line than the A papered.

As for the numbers, we know Perfect Foundations have 100% breeding ability (C/yellow paperings) and that ExPerfs/ExPros have 105% breeding ability (B/red paperings).

That leads us to 2. Breeding ability is a hidden percentage number. Basically to get star and gold papers, you increase that hidden percentage, and while PT is not directly related to breeding ability, the higher papered horses do tend to have their PT go higher as well.

3. Breeding advice has been updated, and the FAQ is being rennovated. It compares to both parents, not just same sex.

The paper levels go as follows, best to worst
Stallions:
Star
A
B
C
Showable Only

Mares:
Gold
Blue
Red
Yellow
Failed


These are equivalent to each other: A/Blue, C/yellow, etc.

Now, if you pair Star/Gold parents and they throw an A papered colt, that will be a horse with a high paper level that is still worse than its parents.

Star and Gold, being the highest paperings, also has a wide variety of ability. Several generations of stars and golds will lead to what is called high stars/golds, and if they throw a “low” star or gold that may also be snipped by BA. This applies to other paperings too, as papers cover a range of percentages.

In addition, people often hand snip horses that don’t fit their breeding program. This can lead to colts or even mares that are superior to their parents being hand snipped even though they passed BA.

As for 4., horses can throw higher or lower than their breeding ability. It’s random chance.

Your best bet for maximum number of intact foals per generation is to “breed even” - match papers. C to yellow, B to red, etc. Some people prefer to also match pedigrees, making them symmetrical, though that’s not entirely necessary for highest rates of passing - it just looks pretty and a lot of people prefer to buy horses with symmetrical pedigrees. Matching papers means the parents will have roughly equal breeding ability, so the foal doesn’t have to be vastly superior to one to avoid being snipped by BA.

Your best bet of getting high paper levels fastest is by “bootstrapping”. This is to take the highest papered stallion you can find, and breed him to a bunch of mares. Then you take the foals and breed them back to the stallion. For this, you run all the colts through BA, but leave the fillies untested except for papering. You use papering to see if they’re good enough to keep - it needs to be as good as or better than the mare. They won’t be better than the stallion, so they won’t pass BA yet. Once you get a generation where more than half of the colts passed BA, however, you can finally start properly testing the fillies with BA as well. Your paper level jumps a lot faster this way, but it takes more money because you have to paper all of the fillies instead of running them through BA (and BA is free, but papering is 1k apiece).

For both techniques, you’ll get more total intact foals by making sure your mares have a full pasture bonus. Leaving mares in pasture for 30+ days is the best bonus, but even a few days will help.

Hope that caught everything! If any of that confused you further just ask and I’ll elaborate :)

I breed mainly by bootstrapping. I managed to pick up a high Star stud from the public auction and bred him to every mare I could. I kept all of his daughters and gelded his sons. I'm now starting to breed the daughters back to him and another equally high Star stallion. I have kept a few of their Star colts intact even though they wouldn't pass BA because I need some more Star boys (so they go with the lower mares).

I also have lower Star stallions that I do BA all of their foals (but only a few pass).

I have a separate herd (still slightly bootstrap) with an ExPer Macchiato stud that was bred to mainly Yellow mares but this season I have upgraded that herd enough that the Yellows were removed and Reds were added.

I also just purchased Chinchilla and Wrong Warp so those mares will be bred by straws to studs with those genes regardless of paper level.