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 Two Wishes: "Next Horse" key, Breeding Difficulty slider 
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Handicapper

Joined: Thu Sep 08, 2016 3:57 pm
Posts: 481
Post Two Wishes: "Next Horse" key, Breeding Difficulty slider
On the "My Racing Stable" screen, when navigating using the "i" button to run the stable my right hand is starting to swell. With 512 horses and breeding encouraging larger batches this literally hurts. Also the "Your Yearlings", or other breeding screens, it would be nice that if, once you opened the detail screen, that you could navigate to the prev/next using a key. Closing the detail screen, and clicking on the next horse (hundreds of times x2) also is hurting me.

Old people problems. Sorry.

I also want to pull my suggestion from the breeding difficulty thread to this forum. Add breeding difficulty to the things already adjusted in the difficulty switch when starting a game.
    Hard: same as now
    Normal: somewhat more consistent offspring results, same starting game pool types
    Easy: generous offspring results, better bars in game pool

On the boards you hear from very experienced league players, and what I would call "serious" casuals. People at least experienced and interested enough to come post on the game boards. That is a self sort, and leaves out very casual and, of course, new to game players. If some of the crowd here does not prefer the new difficulty it will certainly overwhelm new players.

Typical of games, I would recommend "Easy" to new players (or existing who know they want that, preference is theirs). But it should be pretty easy as an intro for new players. This gives a difficulty progression path, which should really help both initial uptake and replayability. While us familiar players can suit our preference, or needs if it is league, having that curve is even more helpful for new players who can't post here as they don't exist yet!

The SO7 breeding rework is fascinating, and even more integral to the progression of the game. So I think it makes sense. This is also why I will plug lowering the mare barn cost just a tiny bit more still. Maybe a lot more on "Easy". It is so integral to the game, that excluding new players makes no sense. "First one is always free" seems better. Though it should have at least a token cost to fit theme of other upgrades. Stud barn high, and cost of increasing barn space higher to offset perhaps. But that mare barn lets a new player also start to get familiar. And there is a lot to learn with more meat in your simulation now. So maybe mare barn cost also affected on Easy / Normal? or just plain reduced more.

Thanks!


Wed Feb 06, 2019 8:17 pm
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Handicapper

Joined: Wed Apr 06, 2011 9:59 pm
Posts: 129
Post Re: Two Wishes: "Next Horse" key, Breeding Difficulty slider
Would be nice if the yearling tab remembered where you were scrolled to AND showed the icon when you auction a yearling. Right now, I might get 50-100 yearlings in the barn and decide to auction 75%. When the auction icon doesn't pop up, I'm reopening horses sometimes multiple times because I forgot where I was. It doesn't help that if I scroll down a bit and click on a yearling, then go back to the yearling list only to find I'm now back at the top. Sorts also aren't kept so if I sort by name, next time I return to the tab, it's back the way it was. That was true of previous games, too, though. The game defaults to the order the horses were obtained/born/retired to stud.

Would be nice if the game remembered our sort preferences. I prefer to sort by age and then by name although on odd occasions I might sort by something else. I also preferred this in the breeding barn but now we can't sort by age there.

A next horse button would be nice but how would that work? Alphabetical? By age? Sire and dam? Date acquired/born? If you rename a 2yo, does its place in the order change or does it remain in its old spot? If you buy a new horse, does it go to the end of the list or does it get inserted somewhere depending on what sort is used? It'd be easier to have a list of horses on the left or right side of the horse summary screen that you can click on and navigate that way rather than going back to the stable listing to click on a new horse. Depending on your window size (I use 1280x1024 windowed mode mostly), there might be a block of empty space that can be used to add a list of your horses so you can navigate around. At the size I use, there's a space next to the rating graph that's unused. The future race declarations box can additionally be shortened to give more space to a horse list. I also use 1920x1080 full screen from time to time and that one has a LOT of unused space. The horse stats tab and the head lad comments could easily be merged into the horse summary tab on that resolution.

With difficulty settings, it would make sense to have there be more of a difference between the modes, but sad part is, most people just gravitate toward what's easier. I honestly doubt many play on anything but easy once they know there's no difference between the three difficulties aside from number of horses and money at the start.

Maybe easy should allow you to have more money and horses at the start but getting horses with 100% potential and other good stats would take forever (like a century or more) and you'll never be given a horse with 100% in anything where as on hard mode you may have less money and horses to start but 100% horses are possible much sooner (maybe within 10-20 years) and you can randomly be given a horse with 100% in at least one stat. Maybe also have on easy the best horses never show up at auction so you have to deal with either getting decent horses (like 1-2 G1 wins or at best are G2 winners) or hoping your own horses can win where as on hard mode a really good G1 winner might show up at auction at least once or twice a year although the price could easily be in the $3-5 million range. To get people to even consider trying a harder difficulty, there has to be reward there. Otherwise, people gravitate toward what's easier. If people don't want to play hard mode without incentive, there's no reason to have it. That's especially true when there's little difference between easy and hard.

I don't see changing prices on something like the mare barn would make a difference. Once you start breeding, money is super easy to get. The game I had before my current one I got a whopping $1 billion in. There's betting to get more money early on which is one of the best ways to get it without breeding and selling foals. Otherwise there's the loan you can take out. Buying, upping a horse's rating in a few races, and reselling it is also viable to get money. Are those methods intuitive enough for new players? Probably not, but reducing the mare barn to a price where you can buy it with the starting cash doesn't help, either. If players are buying the breeding barn that early and don't have a cash stockpile, they won't be able to breed anyway. Getting up a decent group of mares (like 2-10) to breed and then paying the stud fee for each one can get expensive really fast. If anything, upgrades like the mare barn, stallion barn, swimming pool, etc should be unlocked as you meet certain goals in the game. Maybe you should be required to play via a "story mode" as it were to learn the basics of the game and unlock the various upgrades. The story mode paces things out so you buy the upgrades over time and not before you're ready. Once you complete it, you can start a new game and buy the upgrades when you want as long as you have the money. Playing that mode should be skippable for the experienced player but maybe give a bonus for completing it like 50-100% increase in starting money or something. Or maybe the upgrades are related to how well you perform in the game. How many real owner/trainers just starting out have access to a breeding barn, their own private training track, swimming pool, etc? Maybe when you get your first grade 3 win, you can buy the gallop rails but it takes gettting a group 1 win to unlock the mare breeding barn. Maybe require 20-50 group 1 ones to unlock the stallion barn. Or things unlock based upon how much money you have. Maybe the mare barn unlocks once you earn $1.5 million to ensure you have money to at least put a few mares into it and breed them. Then the stallion barn could unlock at $10 million or something like that.

While breeding is a big part of the game, maybe the answer isn't to make the mare barn easier to get but instead making the rest of the game more interesting without it. There are people in the real world who have nothing to do with breeding. They just race. Others just breed and sell but never race. If you end up broke, that shouldn't be game over. Maybe have a benefactor can pop up and give you like $500k and a better than average horse (make it always a gelding so it can't be bred to if needed) once per game if you lose everything while also turning on tips to help you perform better until you reach $1 million or something. If players aren't able to get up enough money to buy the mare barn as is, they're going to really run into trouble if they can buy it that much faster just because buying mares to even put into the barn and then breeding those mares to NPC owned stallions can quickly bankrupt a poor player. Having to wait two game years to even try to get a modest return on investment from a foal is too long if you're hanging on by a thread as it is. Maybe there should be little scenarios that pop up throughout the game like having the opportunity to invest in a horse owned by another owner, ability to enter your main country's national lottery, randomly being asked to take over training for a horse (while in trainer/owner mode rather than trainer only mode), inheritances, etc. Right now the only "scenario" (if you can even call it one) that pops up in owner/trainer mode is getting a virus. Having something like a random flood, fire, tornado, off track incident, horse death, price changes/inflation, or loss of staff (temporary or permanent) would add to things for the simulation part. Whether or not you have scenarios could be an option that's turned on/off like legends are. You can choose what kind of scenarios you want. If you just want to focus on breeding, you can just focus on that, but if you want a more realistic simulator, you can turn on different scenarios. Maybe one type of scenario can be randomly being granted different upgrades either for free or at a reduced price. At one point, it was possible for horses to die during a race, but I haven't seen that since ... SO4, I think. Maybe it was SO5. It's been a while at any rate. If scenarios are added, horse deaths (on and off the track) should be one of those options. It's sad to lose a horse, but it's realistic. They should range from having to be put down on the track to surviving anywhere from a day to a year before they finally die from their injury. Maybe have an "upgrade" for your stable be a cemetary and you can choose to bury your top horses there. Also maybe have the option to offer tours to tourists which can bring in a modest income. Something else that would add to the game is randomly having purses for various races be increased or decreased due to various factors. I.E. One year, tracks in an area are given money by the government to increase purses so purses are increased maybe 10%. Five years later, that expires so purses drop back to where they were. A few years later, there might be an economic depression resulting in purses being reduced 20%. Having races have sponsors that can actually change over time would be interesting as well, especially if the game randomly gives a bonus for winning certain races with the same horse in a year like the Triple Crown for your country or maybe taking the Pegasus World Cup, Dubai World Cup, and Breeders' Cup Classic, or the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, Breeders' Cup Turf, and the Japan Cup in the same year with the same horse. Or have trainers can randomly send you a request for a match race between your horse and theirs (something I know isn't done anymore but would still be interesting nonetheless) causing a random match race to be added to the schedule (the only time there would potentially be more than 24 races in a day) that your horse is then automatically entered into if you accept. Track would be chosen at random. Maybe even have tracks can randomly be closed for various reasons (disease, renovations, natural disasters, or even war) and the races run there are not run for the duration it's closed or the races are temporarily moved to another track. Maybe even also have races can sometimes be run at different distances (especially if they're run at a different track) and turf races can occasionally be moved to the dirt track if it's too muddy. Not something that occurs in the UK since many tracks don't have dirt/AW tracks, but it does happen in the US. Additionally, maybe have races can change their class from year to year so a G1 can be demoted or a listed/allowance race can be promoted to a G3. Have a comment in the showcase file so some races can never be demoted or have something like conditions so we can choose a range where a race can be promoted/demoted. Like G3/G2/G1 with the G3 being the lowest a race can be demoted to, G2 is the default, and G1 is the highest. A straight G1 would never be changed. A race that can only ever be demoted could be like G3/G2. A race that can only ever be promoted would probably just be something like G2/G2/G1. A wide range for a race might be H60/LISTED/G1 so a race can fluctuate wildly from year to year with that one. How many of a certain class the schedule has in a given year could be set in the sched file so there isn't an odd year where there's very few G1s or every race that can be a G1 is suddenly a G1. It would result in some loading time from year to year while the game reconfigures the schedule, though. Since the game saves the schedule with the saves now, it should theoretically be possible to do this. Would also be nice to have the ability to either add new races, remove races, move races around, or rename races entirely that's individual per game. Making a schedule only to find I need to make some adjustments (some rather major ones) gets rather irritating when I have to edit the sched file, start a new game, run it for a while to see where adjustments need to be made, and start over with editing the sched file again. Being able to make those adjustments on the fly during a game would be easier.

I think a more pertinent change to the game would be allowing for up to 24 races per day but regardless of the meets. If I want 10 races at one track, 4 at another, 8 at another, and 2 at a fourth track, I should be able to just like I should be able to have 24 races at a single track. While making my own schedule for SO7, I kept running into tracks that had 10-12 races in a day but I had to split them up over 2 days. Other days I saw 4-6 tracks having meets in the same day but due to the 3 meet limit, I had to bounce some meets to other days. Then I've also found the game doesn't seem to recognize there's a December 31st. The US schedule I made I set to go from 1 to 365. Day 365 should be December 31st but only goes to December 30th. Change the end date to 366 and the game crashes. Game also doesn't seem to recognize leap year so would be interesting to have special races that run only under certain conditions like on leap day or if a Triple Crown was achieved.


Thu Feb 07, 2019 5:26 am
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Handicapper

Joined: Thu Sep 08, 2016 3:57 pm
Posts: 481
Post Re: Two Wishes: "Next Horse" key, Breeding Difficulty slider
Some of your ideas sound very interesting. And I think a scenario based play/random game events would be a fantastic interest keeper for the solo player. In scope it may be better as a larger expansion? Perhaps fodder for 8?

guardian_titan wrote:
Sorts also aren't kept
(between screen changes)
I'll second that this would be nice.

guardian_titan wrote:
remembered our sort preferences
(after closing the game)
Also nice for QoL.

guardian_titan wrote:
A next horse button would be nice but how would that work? Alphabetical? By age? Sire and dam?

I am assuming it would just use the list however it was currently sorted. Generally that is what would expect in any UI.

guardian_titan wrote:
easier to have a list of horses on the left or right side of the horse summary screen that you can click on

Not for my old hands. Right now keyboard to mouse and two clicks. That just eliminates one of the two mouse clicks. It would be best to just leave the hand on the keyboard and tap tap tap. But it would make for a good-looking UI.

Breeding difficulty seems to be getting a look. About the mare barn. You can claim a mare, or buy a cheaper one now there are broodmare sales. Stud fees start about £1000. The bigger trap is buying the barn, if it is pricey. Selling the foals is not bad as a boost, but if you need 10 million before you sell your first 10K foal, that is wrong. It is also neither realistic nor fun. The goal isn't a Derby winner from the first two foals, but learning how things work. That is also realistic. The problem with locking the barn behind doing well in the game is, your best way of doing well in the game is to use it! Circular dependencies cause frustration.

guardian_titan wrote:
While breeding is a big part of the game, maybe the answer isn't to make the mare barn easier to get but instead making the rest of the game more interesting without it.


There already is a game mode where you are just the trainer. And, of course, my suggestion does not apply to it. I play it sometimes, and it feels harder than when you have access to breeding. This also informs why I make the suggestion.

guardian_titan wrote:
most people just gravitate toward what's easier

Some do, some prefer challenge. Others want a balance, some it depends on the day of the week what they prefer. If all are enjoying the game then everyone is happy.

guardian_titan wrote:
It's sad to lose a horse (during a race), but it's realistic.
Yes, it is. But this may be a clear case of realism not adding fun to a game.

guardian_titan wrote:
Having something like a random flood, fire, tornado

It would have to be tuned well. I did have the eye of a hurricane pass over my farm. Not a scratch on any horse. Breedings all happened on schedule. But, I never recovered from the economic hit of repairing it. Small operations can get taken out in one hit. However, disasters are fun in other sims, so with thinking .. maybe.

Perhaps you should organize some of these thoughts for expansion ideas. Like I said, they are interesting!


Thu Feb 07, 2019 11:54 pm
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