Playing the combined game I do things a little differently.
They all have flat careers. At 3 I stop running those who aren't group 1 contenders on that flat. When they turn 4 I go through all of them, checking jumping stats for average and good, and use the 'n' key to mark them with a note. The poor jumpers that aren't good on the flat get sold. I just put j in the note as I never read the note, what it does though is put a small white trainagle next to the horses name, which helps differentiate the jumps horses from the flat ones. I then race all the 4yo with notes over hurdles.
When the flat horses turn 5 and 6 I check to see if they can jump, if so they will go jumping. I found if they don't they will not trial well.
I normally export my horses in late August. All the 5YO jumpers get run in trials. I keep the good ones from the trials, the ones running ok in the game that don't trial well, and the ones with sires/ dams I like and sell the rest. As you starting out you probably can keep everything for longer, but I have to make space as each season another 140 or so enter my stable and that means 140 have to go. Of the 140 2yo's that come in you can be sure that at least 40 will have something like 20% potential. I sell these. Everything above 40% I keep as they can improve.

I drop all sires of mine in breeding barn to £20000 and accept all requests. Dams I keep 125. retruning the rest to the stable and selling them. The 140 or so comes from the horses I buy and I retire in August, which adds more horses to teh breeding barn. That way some 500 horses or so of my lines get bred every season. It's got to stage that my lines are in everything and as a result stuff I buy just keeps improving my breeding lines. I go to all auctions and buy loads that I like the breeding of are have performed well. If the stats are bad I sell it, although I make allownces for front runners

Playing like this isn't for everyone. I have 500 or so horses in my stable, seasons take a long time, and you have to be ruthless, but I seem to be doing well in the trials so must be doing something right.

I think combined maybe the way to go, in so6 there was a definite advantage in being able to run them at 2yo over flat and get that early potential hike. NHF on jumpers at 3yo does not seem to have quite the same effect but you do still see some movement. I just find the management of both in one game to be a bit of faff without the tff, to separate jumps lines from flat. That notes idea is a good one though.

I am doing similar in my first ever combined game, but If you really want to flood the game with horses with your lines in, and money doesn't matter to you, put all your sires to £10. This is what I do and my flat games get so many requests and i get plenty of options to buy them back from different game mares.

I trialed some 95% horses and I have a few new team members as some of the 95ers thrashed my 100% horses
so I think if your hitting 90% the 90 - 100% bracket does not really make much of a difference

Could not agree more!
Chasing max potential can ruin your other unseen stats.
Breed based on performance not stats.

Been playing with large stables since game was in beta (300+) and trying to cull as much as I dare, I know seasons take a long time. Main point I see so far is sell all discards but your post opens it up a bit further. I`m trying to keep my stable as small as possible! Moving my decent or half decent colts to stud with low price is a definite instead of just retiring after all I'm not adverse to moving my 2yo fillys straight to the barn, maybe the other AI trainers can gain something from the colts and I could buy them back.
The 40% rule I have to kick, seems too low. How many actually rise enough in your games to make trials? I have a 70% rule going atm, after 20yrs it still gets bad in a flat only game.

I keep trying to keep it small and I keep failing miserably. On average I tend to breed 100 per year both games and I am usually taking 60/70 through to trial, that’s a lot of horses once you age them to ten, I was not time warping the game I would run out of space even at 500. I only cull once at present as I cannot see enough about the horses to tell and keep getting surprises. As of now I am wading through 1800 horse files for my current NH trial. So far I have made big strides on my 3m chasers, but cannot do anything with my 2m hurdlers. This is going to be an interesting league, I never focus on full potential I have too many trial stars who never got there, but do have access to it in my lines.

I have 2 lots of breeding in my flat games, I have only CK form, doesn't really matter about potential. Then I have 100% potential horses also . These don't need to be great in the CK, but i keep breeding them together to keep the 100 in the lines an access to it. Every now an then I just mix an match and eventually they just seem to merge. It doesn't take up too much time adding the 100% lines in the background to see how they go

I've been doing the breeding very similar it's hard to let the 100% horses go. It's not a faulted way to go and in some games might work.

I keep starting games to see how the new game compares when I export after a few seasons. Now time to start deleting game slots or backing them up.
Most are rubbish!

The 100% I had on my flat game has now totally fallen away, I have a the odd sprinter from that line who gets to about 95/97 but most of my flat horses don’t get beyond 90% and all the barn horses in some way or another come from the same horses. It is I think one of the biggest issues in the league mode, that your limited essentially to whatever the game throws up and I bet it is random, some trainers will never find full. Though in the round this is still better than the way it was. The flat game is also just a side show for me I don’t really care about it, but know from so6 bars are a more significant than the jumps.

I have 100% in my jumps game which now arrives from 6yo to 8yo and it is getting more consistent in my breeding, I have been gradually sprinkling it into my more established lines after finding a new potential stud at the yearly auctions. Will probably have a lot of white jump horses this season. And have made minor improvements on everything 2.4m to 3.4m both jumps and hurdles, but cannot seem to do anything with my 2m horses right now. The game does consistently throw up good new horses though and not from my breeding either, I am beginning to think this is due to my horses never really being allowed to dominate the game now I am in full league breeding mode and time warping them to be able to geld and breed.

I am reaching the conclusion that letting my flat lines drive my flat game breeding and selling ck failures is ruining my ability to progress with new game blood. I have completely stopped this practice now, I only sell geldings for cash.

What's time warping Josh?

Start from an empty stable, which I always do within each trial cycle. I bred three or four seasons, keep and name those I want to keep then take a one year break in breeding. So I have a staring season with horses from 5 or 4 to 2yo and no yearlings. I then save a copy of the game which is the restore point. I then continue to play the game no more breeding though but I geld all the stallions and race them all properly, exporting each year up until they are 10yo, some to 12yo. When I do their final export I just retire them from the game and eventually I have nothing left. I then take the exported horse files and copy them into the restore point save. I now have the game pre geld and racing but with exports ready for the league. Then I trial after which I tidy up the exports getting rid of the tosh. Then back to the game, I now stud or drop into the barn all my trial successes, those I know develop or those who had game success basically what I want to breed with and I also tidy the breeding barn generally. And hey presto I am set for another cycle. I am full on league breeding now rather than playing the game, least for the jumps, and I could not come up with another way to geld everything and still have my best stallions in breeding. Time warping, well sort of.

Maybe i have read this wrong, but are you saying that you somehow take the "exported horse files" (*.hrs) and copy them back into a saved game?

No I think he's making backups in restore folders maybe? Sounds like a lot of file and game manipulation, I'm way too lazy for that!

I just ck all my 3yo against what I believe are my stars and if they can't get into the fray then they go breeding or to the sales. Just sold a dual Derby horse for 2.2M because in the ck he was useless then only just beat him in the Arc with a 4yo, hehe, maybe the AI can do better with him.

There is a staters orders7 file in documents that holds your save data, I frequently make back ups of these both on a USB, my laptop and in a separate back up folder on my pc. This is just to guard against losing my save data.

I also frequently go into the sub folder ‘saves’ in this main folder where the specific game data and export files are, they are labelled hbd or something such and have your email in the file name. I make copies of these three files also to protect my exported horses again to guard against them disappearing etc.

This method just extends those two back up practices. So I copy the whole so7 folder, rename it ‘restore point’ keep that separate, then play the game on normally to race and export the horses on the original game files. Then from that game I when I am finished I copy the export files and paste them into the restore game replacing the existing files. The game I played on is deleted and I go back to playing from the restore point but with exports that have those same horses fully raced and aged.

Make sense?

The advantages as I see them:

1 - I can breed my best ck horses longer as I retire them younger.
2 - I can geld my jumpers, something that I personally thinks matters without having to worry about losing the horse for breeding.
3 - I am only breeding proven ck horses or with an understanding of how they run, race and develop.
4 - My horses never win big races, least they don’t in the version of the game that moves forward, no one wants to breed with them and thus my game is not full of horses that i can trace back to my lines, so the games keeps throwing up new horses for me to breed with. Does not always make them better but different is appealing.

The downside is the faff and the fact I do really play the game, though I still usually win champion trainer and top jockey just by winning a stack of NHF, juve and novice races. So I do not really mind not playing the game since it offers no challenge whatsoever. The league does though.