As all the big breeders are around I will ask a question in here regarding going preference.

Checking back through my league horses this season I can tell I made a mistake in having too many firm ground NH horses and too many soft ground flat horses.

Now I did my uploads in a rush and never really paid that much attention to it because in SO6 I only kept horses with a full green going bar so they all went on anything. Not having that bar visible I totally forgot about this aspect, which was pretty dopey I admit.

Question is what do you all do with your firm ground NH horses, breed them with soft ground ones and hope they come out soft or good or do you bin them.

Same question with the soft ground flat horses.

Obviously from their racing record you can tell the ones that do go on anything so I am in particular talking about ones that clearly don't. It is evident from some of my horses performances in the league this season that they are close to my best only on 'the wrong' type of ground. Are these horses worth breeding with or am I best cutting them.

Breed with them. Eventually you can breed the firm ground out for NH. Don't breed 2 firms together. I only trial on soft and good to soft in NH so never have any firm ground horses win that. Although I don't have many anymore. My firm ground horses are normally flat horses now.

Try having a few very soft ground horses around they good for getting rid of firm in a line you want to keep

I'd definitely use them, I tend to run my flat trials on Good to soft, Good, then Good to firm, every course gets those 3 grounds every year and if a horse is firmer only, I do as you say and send him some soft ground horses. But doing the trials this way and using the very best point scorers over the 3 grounds, in the long run ground becomes less of an issue. It also depends on just how good they are on soft or firm too, if they're cantering every race on a certain ground but useless on the others I'd still use them quite a bit.

No idea about the NH side, I've done about 20 trials for that so far

Super stallions
saigon
comply which
lidar somain
Vivarini
Border station
Cannaghmore boy
splendent shifting
horsely valarian


Vinny how do you ascertain that these are super stallions. From what you have seen from using them or from their overall stud record. And are they stallions you bred or game ones ?

As Leon has said breed it out of them. I would extend that to say provided they trial well and since I only trial on soft i tend to assume they have high going adaptation bars if they get that far. I would put one in the team if it got their on merit but tend to start from the position that they are not the finished product.

My NH game keeps throwing up firm ground gamebreds with good form so there are always a few in the barn and one or two on my trial sheets. Two of those in recent seasons are full potential breeders so they are worth looking at.

Super stallions is just a term I use, but From breeding with them. So those are a list of every game bred stallion I haven't owned but bred with and their offspring have always improved my trials. Doesn't have to be by loads, some of them just provided a lot of horses that were all slightly better than my current crop. |Others like Comply Which and and Lidar Somain produced a far better standard of horse for my trials. I keep a track and what they added to my lines. So I know Comply Which was all about acceleration, it added a lot of 5f front runners. Lidar Somain I got a lot of really strong staying types. Lidar Somain gave me Hefei delta, which in turn gave me Xinyi Player and Xinyi Nightngale. All because it added something I was lacking in my lines. Cannagghmore boy was similar in it was one of the first game horses I found to really improve my lines, an it was all acceleration.

I make sure I keep any filly who's breeding has got all of these horses somewhere in their lines, regardless of them being poor in the CK or not. I use these mares to then try and find the next stallion that has a trait one of those had, so could be cruising speed etc. These fillies I have found to be vital. All 5 of my week 5 uploads were from mares with most of those stallions in their lines but every one of those mares had failed in the CK. All 5 uploads have far outperformed anything I had before too. I only really started doing this method just after the league started. that list just represents the ones that improved my trials really, without me ever owning them

Hope that's not too long winded Mart

Sorry, to go back a bit further an may answer the question better, I use about 4 or 5 game stallions a season that I send at least 5 mares to each, if it's good I send more once I find out. I chose them from viewing their races if available and seeing if they have a trait I need, like front runner, cruising burst, loads of speed. If the races aren't available or I haven't been watching them in the game, you can see from the race write up usually. Or their record, or their breeding record, sometimes from their breeding too. I go through the breeding barn each start of season to make sure which ones I want to use. Those 'super stallions' are the successful ones

Cheers Vinny that is interesting and is something I was sort of doing on a much smaller scale at start up as I found the two (possibly) best sires available and tried to get them both in each pedigree. Looking back through the pedigrees of my better performing horses I can see reoccurring names (purely by chance) in the pedigrees. Also some of the better game horses have these names in their pedigrees too so that is a good sign. I am no more than 5 generations in so I think I may be able to go back and identify some potential 'super stallions' that are still around and try something similar. Thanks.

Yeah the patterns are the bit that put me on to it originally Mart. And as I say, don't be afraid to keep very average looking mares in your trials if in their breeding they have a lot of those stallions so long as they have the right bars an stats you want, especially if they are average or large build, an average or good agility too. I've had all my best horses from these mares so far. Xinyi Players mare couldn't have scored more than a couple of points in my trials.

As i said we may have to agree to disagree which is in itself utterly fine, but I still don’t see it this way. You cannot win at poker if your not dealt good cards, ok you can bluff but that hardly applies here, so I still see luck as being the major factor. Yes you can enhance your chances, play smart, do all the right things, but if your cards are rubbish your not going to win. Cannot make a full house beat a royal flush no matter what you do.

Take my NH experience, originally I ran two games a UK game and an Irish game, I actively played both, I had full potential breeding lines, if anything my Irish horses looked far superior on paper but at trial they were rubbish compared to the UK horses, but I kept at it I still did all the right things all the same things and trial after trial after trial the UK horses were far better than the Irish ones. I have long since deleted the Irish stable but there is nothing other than luck of the draw to explain that difference, one game threw up good ck breeding stock one did not.

You can be the best player of the game in the world in terms of enhancing your probability of success but if your cards are crap there is nothing much you can do with them. On SO6 you could solve that with exports and imports, here on SO7 your bound by the stock your game creates and your kidding yourself if you think they are all created equal. Why I think playing multiple games will end up being the way to go. Input luck on what you get output luck on what you create from it. The only variable you have over and above is time, keep rolling those dice and hoping the game throws up something new.

I am spending a huge amount of time and effort to improve my 2m hurdlers and my 3m chasers, breeding with every game stallion and I mean every one, cross breeding my distances etc and for love nor money I cannot make any improvements, for me that’s just luck, bad luck as it happens and only time and better luck will solve the problem.

It’s not all luck but there is a huge slice it is certainly not all skill, so I remain of the view it is still time spent and luck in terms of your breeding stock, but that maybe just me, be a very dull world if we all thought the same.

I was taught by my grandfather when very young loose with class but mote importantly win with class
be a gentleman in victory and in defeat.

We all know Josh and there is no way he was mocking what you have achieved Leon no way he meant
its all luck what you have achieved this season.

I for 1 stand up and applaud what you have done and achieved its unbelievable that you have mounted
and attack on every front you are the only one to have been able to do this and I have the upmost respect
for what you have done. But dont be too defensive you have nothing to prove the stats dont lie luck can inly
take you so far.

I have been playing SO since SO2 and never really used tff files. So I can safely say that SO7 requires way more thinking to achieve what you want to do. It requires detailed analyses of breeding etc to get your lines moving forward. Sure I have hit lulls in some distances like 2m chase for example, but managed gradually to improve that now so I am getting better horses at 2m chase.

You don't have the stats anymore so you have to work them out for yourself. You have a note system in game that can be used or your could use a spreadsheet like Vinny. There is skill in figuring out horses traits and then adding them to your bloodlines. There is skill in cultivating lines and improvimng them with traits that are missing. It's no longer a game of reusing the same horses from a tff file. You got to be careful you don't lose lines. I had to make real effort to keep my GI Joe line going. Almost lost it one stage but now there are a number of horses in the barn with it.

It is essential that the AI breeds with your horses else the AI will never improve and your horses will get stuck without the new enhanced bloodlines the AI can add.

If you playing NH it is essential to watch the races with some of your good horses using jockey cam ( you can tab it to go fast ) as each jump tells you how they jump. If you playing auto you need to try breed good agility and jumping into your lines. A season takes me a week because its a process to add notes etc. Breeding may take me day in some cases to figure out which AI horses to use and which pairings to use. Some horses just don't go together so you need to check this. Great game horses but bad in CK can be interbred to give you great in both. They still crop up especially if you breed with the AI.

Some tips. Go to every auction. Follow every horses you like the run style of or which you think has traits your bloodlines lack. I could go on but SO7 has way more depth in all aspects of the game and trainers should take this into account. Just taking the multi g1 winning stallion and throwing it at everything doesn't work anymore. GI Joe's parents won 2 races between them although they placed a lot in group races but they had stats that I thought matched so I put them together and the result was something special. The parents were both good jumpers who challenged early but each had something the other lacked. When I put them together I got GI Joe if that is not skill then I'm not sure what skill is. And yes I repeated the breeding and got another decent horse

I am not mocking anyone and I genuinely understand the work it takes to develop lines into league winners to do this on multiple fronts and disciples is harder still but there is still luck in play.

I consider myself to have been lucky in that I found one horse at auction who projected everything forward, he was not a successful game horse and had I not happened upon him in that one auction likely as not I would never have given him a second look and I doubt I would have had half the success I did this season. Yes I turned that into many horses a whole breeding line and a fair few G1 winners but it all started with something the game threw up rather than something specific I did. Just as my next leap forward will likely come via a similar route, be it a game stud, mare or random experimental breed.

I 110% agree in that u need a massive amount of luck to play the game .

I've been creating my Euro game to play over the last few weeks and have a look after the first season what horse turned up in my game



I saw this great Irish sprinter who won many group1's and thought he looks the best horse that's gone to stud at the start the of the game and he's turned out to be a monster stallion , by far and away the best stallion I've ever seen



He has breed up to this point over 50 group 1 winners and I just ran his best son I've bred to him a 5 furlong horse against the best 5f league horse I have and he was only 2L behind and probably 5L behind paul's monster sprinter . There has been no skill in breeding him all luck and if I had him at the start of my league breeding then I would have massively been ahead of where my horses were when I finished with the league. Yes the skill bit would be improving his stock but without that little bit of luck i wouldn't have had him to bred to .

Isn't the point that keeping those lines going is the key, and the skill? Everything I've read is basing it all on finding the horse. Not keeping it's lines going properly and improving on them. Finding one pretty good horse is all good an well, the skill lies in developing the lines properly and keeping them improving, not becoming static.

Kaiping Slick was quite an early bred horse, he has finished placed in the league in the Derby, Irish derby, and the Irish Leger, won a group2 too. He's not a world beater by any means an is a way off the top horses, but he's good enough for an early breed like the ones you'll get from him. I never done anything magical to get him, but the skill is if I can kick his lines on and keep improving them by adding traits he doesn't have. Theres loads of horses with as many group1 wins in all my games, an most I will try, but I know why they won't work. I also know why the ones that do work are going to work, and it depends on the mares you're using with them.

Those horses exist in every single game, I really don't see the luck here. That horse hasn't given you a world beater league horse straight away, if it did then yes it would be luck, unless you get other traits into those lines I doubt you'd make up the 5 lengths, and if you wait till the next one comes along without any thought going into your breeding then the lines will fizzle out.

I'm not saying you wont do it, I'm pretty sure you'll breed some monsters from that given you're as good a breeder as there is in the league, but in one of my games before I worked anything out, I had a horse like that, and didn't enhance anything, it gave me all my initial uploads for the league. Virtually all are useless low handicappers. I re-addressed everything I done regarding breeding, trialling, found a similar horse an developed the lines better for group quality horses in the league. Where's all the luck?