I was wondering what factors had any impact on mares when retired to the sheds -

if you run her for perhaps a season too long and she has a bad year retiring with a handicap mark of for example the low 100's rather than nearer 130 when at her peak is her ability to produce better offspring reduced?

and does getting black type matter ? is it worthing nicking a place in a poor group 3 or is that irrelevent ?

does the game just have her stats as what they are no matter her achievements on course ?

hi i can't beleive that noone has bothered to reply to your question or mine which is similar question, if i find out i will let you know otherwise im in the dark too.

I hope this helps a little

As far as I know your horses' stats, both hidden and visible, are set from the moment they are born (or from the moment they turn two, not sure). So whether your horse runs at all, runs badly, injures itself, has a low rating, never wins, is overraced, etc. has no bearing at all on its' potential as a brood/stud (aside from being indicative of its racing ability and thus what it might pass on). I have retired two year olds who never raced who have produced champions; so from what I have observed your horses' 'genes' are set in stone and their career as a racehorse is only an indicator of what they might be able to do in the breeding shed. Or not, you know how unreliable breeding can be lol

As for nicking a grade three placing- as I mentioned above it doesn't have any impact on your horses' ability to produce winners.

Good luck with your breeding

thanks Kenny / Sabella for the replies

So if you are strictly trying to breed good horses for the leagues, would you even need to race the horses at all? Or could you just continuously fast forward season after season running each horses once or twice? Is this how most people breed league horses?

You would need to race the horse as some will run green in there first race, some even run green in there second race.

I suppose you could just run them once or twice and fast forward though the seasons but the game would get very boring very quickly. You can get good league horses in the early season so there is no real need to fire though the seasons.

Thanks Kenny for the response. I haven't run in any leagues yet, so I wasn't sure how hard it's going to be to get a competitive runner. I figured you had to get 4 or 5 generations into the pedigree to get anything worthy, but I'm happy to hear that's not the case. Yah, I can see the game getting really boring fast forwarding, so I try to avoid that.

Last season I had 2 game bred horses that ran very well one finished 3rd in the Irish 2000 Guineas and 4th in the St James Palace, the other won a G1 Hcp and finished 2nd in a G1 race.