HGG Community Forums

Ok, so it has been a while since I have talked about this, so I don't know how many know. With an accidental account I created on HJ1 right when I started playing and didn't realize there were two servers I decided to run an experiment. I had a handful on random create mares, an uneven 2/3 cross colt and miraculously a Diamond age stud. I didn't think to grad the extra barn for new people, so back at that time I had 20 stalls and 10 pasture spaces, and no money. What do you do? Right?

This is what I did:

I like putting two different stallions in the pasture and letting them breed randomly, but with a 1 stallion pasture I divided the mares with the stallions based of of who would most likely produce live foals (I did not genetic test though, because I did not want that to influence future breeding decisions with the descendants). I would then take the offspring from one stallion line and breed them to the other and vise versa. I did not breed by generation! I had no room for that jazz, and I started with an uneven stud to begin with with foundation mares. I bred all the mares to those stallions and BAed the foals. I would run comparison test on the colts and keep a cot that was superior to sire to take over the line (I liked to think of it as with wild horses when a young stronger stallion takes over a herd). With what little room I couldn't keep a show horse herd, so survived off of auctioning spelded, creating and selling rank specials, and grabbing the 5k weekly pay and really not spending money on anything (I really didn't do much, so it was nice that this account was my main one) I quickly ran out of room for more mares, so every month I calculated afpt on my meager band and culled the lowest ones to equal the number of intact fillies I got. Very often most foals would be snipped especially when I started breeding superior colts, but I didn't have much room anyways.

Eventually with meager living I was able to gain a basic upgrade and an extra 90 stall? barn. I will have to check on that. I now am just keeping all the mares till I run out of room in my pasture again and put the best representative from each stud line in it and let it breed randomly, and the extra barn I am working on filling with show foals, though I don't get on enough to actually show them so that is a kink in the system, but if someone was playing regularly this would be a good start to getting a show herd down. At least they are being trained now so they should have the opportunity to get more points when I do show them.

Now what about quality? What is even going on with this not even generation but not bootstrapped sort of breeding? Well my new stallion I was excited about aged up and (Fortunately/ unfortunately?) produced a superior colt his first season. I got curious, and papered this colt and he is a star boy! His pedigree is a catywonkous mess, but he is more or less fourth gen ish, and I think it can be said that improvement is being made in these strange uneven lines. haha. I kinda feel sad because I have a feeling there isn't going to be any more intact foals from my early mares, but they are about to age out anyway.

And here is the boy, I am probably going to see a dip in intact percentage again, but I know only my best mares are contributing to the next breeding crop now. XD


Lancelott

Another thing that I think will be interesting is to one day genetic test my herd once I have had a few more generations in and see what has happened to my potentially lethal genes (Various whites and frame were in my original herd thanks to various rank specils and the Diamond Age base stud) I lost 5 foals out of 25 a typical ratio so far, but with how much white is one so many of the horses I kinda expected more. Will these genes be naturally selected against, or will they stay at this sort of equilibrium or will they eventually start taking most of my foal crops? This is largely due to chance, I don't even know if my studs have frame, but ones that due will likely create more dead foals than those without, but let's see.