Re: Moderately Experienced Player Advice - With Pictures! :)
Jango wrote:
I will accept i could be wrong about this and would welcome any different opinions, but i like to have realized potential as high as possible with horses i use to breed with.
Yes absolute potential is passed on as absolute potential when breeding.
But my untested suspicion is that breeding with a horse that has low realized potential "might" result in offspring that on average dont end up realizing their absolute potential.
Because of the random nature of realized potential its difficult to test with any certainty, but ive had batches of horses that never get close to realizing their full potential and to me it appeared to happen most often when i was breeding with low realized potential horses or older horses whose realized potential had started to fall.
Maybe i'm mistaken, but i see no harm in realizing as much potential as possible by running them 4 times before breeding with them.
I must admit I have never seen realised potential make any difference to the foals I have bred. Before my game started going wonky, I probably bred 2 out of 5 horses that had both 100% realised and 100% absolute potential. My game produces a lot of good stallions with 100% realised potential but only a few good mares so many of the mares I bred with had not reached 100% realised potential but this didn't stop them producing the same percentage of good foals.
I can't comment on breeding with older horses in the barn as I only keep horses in the barn for about 6 years before they are replaced with the next generation of good horses but I am sure I read someplace that Mark, (the creator of SO6), saying that older horses that had dropped their absolute potential would still breed to their best absolute potential.
In my NH game I export many 4yo mares to the barn that have not yet reached both 100% absolute and realised potential and they still breed true. My NH horses don't reach 100% potential until they are 5yo. Maybe my horses would do better in the online league if I waited until they had maxed out potential before retiring them to the barn, but even so, I still get a lot of G1 winners in the online league.
In my flat games when I experimenting with new breeding lines, many horses are sent to the barn at the end of their 2yo careers, they never race as 3yo.
Jim