Okay, back after a few months away and I'm at a complete loss to describe what just happened. I left off at the end of a year in late November. I came back to finish that season off and then rolled into the new season with just 14 horses in my stable.

By the end of May I climbed into first place as a trainer with 30 wins in 100 races. 12 of the 14 horses were completely reliable and then came June. Suddenly all but one of the horses couldn't beat a stuffed horse across the finish line. Horses with 120 ratings couldn't beat horses in C2 trash races against horses rated 50-80.

Granted, a few of the horses are 6-8 years old, but they were winning from November through May.

Is there some sort of aging code that triggers in June that causes the horses to break down mid-season? Is it the weather?

One horse was racing and winning a third of his races in C1 G1's against 120s and now the jockey is telling me he's struggling against horses rated 90-100 in C2's.

Am I racing them too often? I pretty much run my horses every 3-5 weeks.

What is going on??? heheh

I'm guessing a few of your horses are ready for breeding, looks like your playing a flat game. Time to move on, in one of my games they seem to decline at 4yo so count your blessings. June is about when the top 3yo have to take on the older horses. + Jockeys talk rubbish, if your great horse doesn't finish in the top half of the field they will usually tell you the horse struggled, just ignore!

If you are not playing in league mode then you can see maturity stats! Along with other stats I can`t remember.

Edit: And no you aren't racing them too often.

"Is there some sort of aging code that triggers in June that causes the horses to break down mid-season? Is it the weather?"
That's just daft!!!

Breeding time? I hadn't thought of that. I assume that would apply to both sexes of horses? And yes, it's a flat non-league game.

As far as the jockey's talking trash, that still wouldn't really explain the actual poor showings, but it does help to know they're coded to often just cover their bases in a bad run.

I'm assuming most of what I'm seeing is coincidental to a degree is the best horse in my stable is just flying along. It's a 3 year-old that lost the Derby by a head and then won the Preakness and Belmont and has won 2/3 of every race they've run.

I really wish I could dump the race results of my stable of horses to a spreadsheet so I could really analyze the data.

Jockeys have an honesty stat. Ones with high honesty should, you would hope, tell the truth.

And July is when the Australian schedule ages up, and for a while there my horses were being listed as a year older after Dec when they weren't in Australia. But I think Mark fixed that.

Fantastic info. My jockey is highly honest, but obviously I can't be sure about the others and that's roughly a third of all my races. Time to start paying attention to that as well. I forgot all about that stat. Thanks!

The other big thing I'm trying to figure out is how I can look at one of my horses and they'll run a specific, reliable time at say, 5f and do it over and over until I move them up in class and suddenly they can't seem to run the same distance in the same time.

It's a bit mind-numbing. I wonder how typical it is for other players -- especially this: My horses get ratings like 115 and can only seem to win in C2 Conditions or Allowance races against horses rated 70-90. They destroy those horses, but move them up a notch and they trail the field.

Great puzzle to be solved.

Do you have a backup from right before the performance dropped? If so send the files in. If there is a problem it may help. It's possible that you bred a certain performance trait into your horses.

With your distance vs time issue, that's because the higher the class goes, the faster the in-race pace gets. So a horse that ran a good time in a C5 5f race would struggle in a C3 5f. If they're taking longer than they did the in the lower class, it could be that the early faster pace is tiring them out and then they're not getting as much of a speed boost down the stretch?