HGG Community Forums

Could you clarify what it is you need help with?

A) How to select individual horses?
B) What makes a good breeding/show horse?
C) What horse(s) you should keep vs what horse(s) you should sell?

So...

There is no right or wrong way to play this game, but when it comes to breeding stock my best advice to you if you're looking to cut down and refocus is to decide what your goals are.

Do you want to breed evenly or not? Do you want to start from the beginning with all foundations or do you want to jump around with a few of various generations?

Do you want to focus on color/pattern or quality most? Do you want to chase those high PTs or those Star/Gold papers, or would you rather build quality more slowly in favor of focusing on looks?

If you want to focus on color, what colors and patterns do you most love? Do you understand the various paths to those colors? Are they widely available to provide you with tons of broodstock or are you going to have to really hunt, or invest in GMT tokens to get a decent sized herd?

Do you want to focus on just one main color/pattern, or do you want several? I have 6 pattern/color groups I'm working on myself. Your numbers go up fast!

Once you have an idea of your breeding goals, it's much easier to look at what you currently have in the barn and decide if they fit or not...


As far as show ponies go:

The rule of thumb is that you want at least 3 show ponies for every breeder you own to fund your breeding. This is especially important if most of your mares live in pastures.

In general, high PT established older show ponies with a lot of points are the goal. I would be generally hesitant to cull any older show ponies with more than 100 or so points....

I personally tend to cull all altered foals with a PT under 10.0 and replace them with high PT foals (preferably 11 and up but I will buy 10.5 and up) from the auction. It takes months for show pony foals to start to earn their purchase prices back, but eventually you will have a large and productive show herd bringing in a huge daily show bonus. Many older, established players in the game have show bonuses in the hundreds of thousand hbs per night.

So if you're not fussed about breeding evenly, breeding As to Blues should get you to move towards Stars and Golds. You can easily get several generations at A/Blue, but as long as your foals are passing BA or SBA, you will get there. Especially if you require your colts to be Superior to their dads...

The other way to do it is to get ahold of the very best stallion you can afford and breed him to whatever mares you have and "bootstrap" your lines up.

The stardust you're talking about is probably Nexus. (Axiom has a similar effect but is a closed gene and you have to own foundations with the gene to be able to have it).

If you're keen on Ice/Nexus and not fussed about even breeding, I am breeding a Fantasy show line and have some solid A colts from last season. I will hopefully have more this season so we could maybe work out a sale.

I'm out of town for the weekend but if you're keen, you're welcome to search my herd (ID 3790) and PM me.

Thanks for assisting Cheers. I was at work most of the day. :)