Hi,

I've been quiet for a good while already. After joining the first league season last year to see where I'm standing I had to take a break just a few weeks into the season due to work.
Anyway, my horses haven't been that competitive except for one filly, but I couldn't find the time to go on improving my lines.
It's getting better now work wise, but I've hit a giant roadblock regarding my horses.
I've spent a lot of time last week to find gamebreds to improve my lines further and have found some. I then started a new game with a shortened season just for breeding and adding the needed stats to my lines, but found something I don't quite understand.
I tried to solidify the potential of my horses first, before I try to add needed stats. Therefore I choose a stallion and some mares that had 98% potential at three years old, the highest potential I managed so far. Haven't found any full potential 3yo to date.
All horses had quite similar stats and so I thought I could strenghten the line in order to only have 98% potential 3yo's instead of a mixture of 94-98%. At four years almost all of my horses have 100% potential, but the 2 yo's and 3 yo's vary.
Now I thought if I only breed the 98% potential horses together, they'd give me nothing else but a bunch of 98% potential horses. But they didn't! Potential still varies between 94-98% for all the offspring. And while in first generation it's about 50:50 if I get a 98% potential 3 yo or a 96% potential one, it's worse in the second generation. As soon as I breed two 98% potential horses from the second gen together, I only get 96% potential 3yo's. Not one single 98% one in about 2 hours of constant breeding yesterday. And I do breed the horses only as long as they still show full potential in the breeding barn.
So I always thought 100% x 100% will for sure throw a 100% offspring, but that does not seem to be the fact, is that possible?
I also had very few of the offspring showing 50% consistency, though all the horses I used for breeding have 100% consistency. Is it possible that the game goes back to stats of the grandparents?

I am not sure, but I think there is a slight randomness in breeding. I tend to find when I breed 98% potential horses together I only get about 30% of them breed true. I have found this to remain fairly constant thru the generations.

Breeding is not an exact science and two 98% horses wil not always produce 98% horses. Just keep breeding the best with the best.

All the other green bars are slightly random as well. If I breed 30 foals, only about 8 of them will have all the maximum bars of the parents. Some will lose a little potential, some will lose a little consistancy etc.. and some will lose two or three bars.

Thanks for you reply.
I don't mind a little randomness at all. I just thought there is none on this game. And with the method of breeding I had so far, I just didn't notice at all, because I just always took the best mares and best stallions and bred them randomly together. So if there are just slight changes, I never noticed them, because I never checked which exact stats the parents had.
But if it's possible to lose some percent of potential or other stats, is it also possible to gain some? Because I've never experienced a foal having better stats than the ancestors.
It has taken me forever to find a 100% extra speed gamebred. The best I had so far had 98% speed. I've bred that horse to many many mares, but never got more than the 98%.

I don't think bars can go up when you breed two similiar horses.

The only way to increase a horses green bars is to find a gamebred horse with better bars and breed with it. Even then you will not get better bars with every foal. I have bred with horses in the breeding barn and produced a horse with better bars, but sometimes it takes breeding 30 - 40 foals to produce one or two horses with the extra bars.

If you breed a horse with a 96% bar with a horse with a 100% bar, most of the time you get a horse with 98% bar.

As I said above, I usually find I need to breed a large number of foals before I get more than an average between the two bars.

Just wondering what version of SO you are using?

As I've mentioned before, there was a stealth nerf to stats on version 1.081+. Cruising burst was going down as my horses get older. And it's possible that this latest version 1.083, Mark added randomness to the horse's potential stat when breeding.

When I found out about the Cruising burst nerf at patch 1.081, I re-installed version 1.079.

So this version cruising burst does not degrade over time and if you breed 2 horses with 9.8 potential 98%, the foal will always come out 9.8 (98%). This is the lightgreen bar.
So my tip would be to go back to 1.079

only trouble i find is that as one stat climbs another will go down if the pair are not equal all round

It's not really going down...it's avereging out.

example


1 mare 5.0 potential
1 stallion 9.0 potential

foal stats is in between 5.0 and 9.0
Let's say 7.0 mare.

So now you breed that 7.0 mare to the 9.0 stallion
Foal stats is in between 7.0 and 9.0
Could be 8.0...lets pretend it's a stallion

So now you could either...
Rebreed the pair of 7.0 and 9.0 to get a mare or

Breed that 7.0 mare with the new 8.0 stallion. This option is worse since the foal will only have a range of 7.0 to 8.0.

The better option is to rebred the 2 previous pair. Then so on and on...


When keeping track of multiple stats, it can get complicated but can be done logically. The problem is that it can be very time consuming and tedious. But at a certain point, when the stats all are nearing maximum and you are breeding horses with similar stats, it becomes very easy to mass produce horses with similar stats

i appreciate and understand what you say with the potential and maybe other stats from one stallion but what about when its time to make another stat higher eg CB without the pot going down? (unless of course next stallion has same pot already)

I'm not having a go at u ( people can bred the way they want) but u way doesn't half make the game sound boring. Can I ask u a question, do u have any fun playing this game !

which way would you suggest?

If I play something it has to be fun ( I don't care about winning), Thunder breeds until the computer gives him what he wants. I don't bred any special way, I don't have some magical approach or some formulaic way like Thunder. I just bred normal take for instance my jumpers, they are 98% jump bred but every now and again i'll put in some flat bred in just to make sure my pool doesn't dry u and get stale. I'll breed for around 15 seasons so I can double breed them, so the ones that doesn't get full potential will go straight into the breeding barn so I call it double breeding. There's no rocket science involved, my motto is keep it simple.

Andy once said sometimes u got to go back to go forward ( some people don't want to do it) but it's sound advice and sometimes u have to get some of u old horses back because they might not have been helpful then but they could be in the future. I had to go backwards with my two years because they were getting faster but losing the potential so I had to get a old horse out to get more potential back in them and they were slower at the start but eventually ( after a good bit) they went faster.

The original game does not interest me anymore. When you know you will win every race, the game loses it's fun.

So I actually made my own game within the game. Which is a lot more enjoyable than the actual game. Since I know my horses will always win, I just run my horses against each other on the CK after every season. Keep the top horses for each distance and delete the rest, kind of like King of the Hill. I have an HDB file for every distance.

If I didn't find a way to make it interesting then I would never play this game since I have so many games. And there are many more games on Steam with their discounts.

I actually prefer strategy and rpg games where u have figure out the optimal way to achieve a certain goal with the least amount of work. Or Min/Maxing stats.

I apply that to every game just like SO6. After some testing, I was able to figure out how breeding works. To beat any game you have to figure out how it works. I would usually move on after beating a game but we have the league.

I'd like to see every trainer improve even if it means I lose races. I'd rather win a few races against top trainers than win every race with lower trainers. That would be like my horses winning every race against the AI. Not very fun.

I wish there was a way to equalize the trainers.

The explanation is very long and I think I offered an explanation to you before but you did not want that if I remember. But if you want the detail then let me know and leave an email so I can contact you.

I'm not gonna post it here. Not everyone is interested.

There is a way to equalize....just allow gamebreds in the league.

Martyn I must have played So 1 for about 8 years just playing with the gamebreds, I didn't have another SO until 4 and I only had that about a mouth before 5 came out.