I have a few questions on exporting horses for the race builder/construction kit. I realize horses have a peak age, and it doesn't seem like we know exactly when that is, or am I missing something?

Lets say you have a new horse, and you don't race it at all, and just advance to september of their 3yo year and export it. Will the horses' abilities for CK races be the exact same as if you were to smartly campaign the horse up to the same point in their 3yo season? In other words, does racing the horse build up better abilities compared to having it sit idle in the barn?

Also, when is the best time to export? Is it really trial and error? Do you just export, and hope the horse is at his/her peak, and hope it's not already past its peak? Thanks for any ifo.

Doza

Firstly I would definately race the horse a couple of times to get rid of any greenness/inexperience otherwise you would be exporting a horse who would probably run under par every time. I could be so wrong there but I believe it`s not worth the risk.

Secondly when you export you should ensure the fitness and condition bars are as high as they can be. What time in the season is totally up to you and if you really want to you could do it more than once in a season just rename the files slightly and test them (remember to rename them back to the original names if planning on uploading them to the league). I only do this with the odd 2yo as they tend to need further as the season progresses so I can then settle on a distance I plan to go for, if only they were good enough, sigh.

Thanks for the answer. Another question. I haven't bred anything yet, but I was wondering. Does the performance of the horse on the track have an effect on their ability to breed top horses? If you took a horse and raced it at proper distances and won 20 G1 races, and then took that same horse and only raced it a few times at completely wrong distances and never won, would this change the abilities of their offspring?

Doza

if you retire to game pool at 3 he will be 4 when you bring him in to your new game they loose a year through exportation

Wouldn`t have thought so but this would be hard to prove as breeding the same stallion and mare produces a somewhat random offspring, most will have similar abilities to the parents but sometimes can be a total dud or if lucky a monster.
You could test the group winning horse in the CK by making a copy of the saved game, playing the horse one way and exporting it then replace the save game and play the horse the other way and export it again then run them against each other to see if there`s a distinct difference between them (if you do this I would be interested to know the results). Not sure how you could go as far as testing the offspring though, I reckon there`s just too many random factors involved.