For those of you who don’t know hypomating is a pretty simple thing. You take two horses(a dam and sire) and put their pedigrees together to make the pedigree of a hypothetical foal. The pedigree usually highlights inbreeding that would occur to help avoid inbreeding and sometimes it highlights the best horses in a pedigree(e.g. will highlight a great grandfather who won 10 G1s). I believe this already could be really great for this game to help make the breeding aspect simpler for everyone.

Hypograding is similar to hypomating as it takes a dam and sire and hypothetically mates them. It then gives a grade based on how good of a pairing the two animals are with an A+ being the top mark. Each rating would then be stored on the dam and sire’s info under a separate tab. I think this especially would benefit the game as it can be hard to differentiate the great sire’s from the mediocre ones just using AEI and race performance. This is a real life thing so I don’t think it would be to far fetched and hope it can be implemented(if others share my sentiments).

The problem with this is that depending on how it's programmed, it could potentially lead to more predictable breeding in the game, which would not be good. I really like the breeding system as it is now, and don't really feel the need for it to be made any simpler.

Just to add a little note to the point I made last night. I think a lot would depend on how reliable you wanted the "hypomating" or "hypograding" to be.

In real life, breeding is obviously very unpredictable. Even for the top sires, only a small percentage of their progeny become top class. Galileo and Dubawi have been the top sires in Europe for the last few years, but for both of them only around 12% of their progeny have won black type races. For every champion they sire, there are many that go nowhere. The percentage is even lower for US sires like Tapit or Kitten's Joy.

I think the game is doing a fairly good job of replicating this at the moment, and it makes the breeding side of the game challenging and all the more satisfying when you find something that works. Introducing something that predicts how good a breeding pairing will be is fine, as long as it doesn't remove the realistic unpredictability that we have now.

This is more of what I was getting at. I don’t want it to based on how perfect to horses mesh more of a adding two numbers together and getting a grade. It would depend a little on distance and surface preference but wouldn’t have anything to do with how well the cross would work.

If the hypomating approximation is better than a tarot card reading (many aren't imho), it would be because they do a statistical regression on the effect the mare's sire had on the AEIs on horses bred to their daughters (there is a broodmare and a broodmare AEI calculation, which the game isn't doing). And then on top of it they look for any same sire/broodmare sire breedings done in the past and compare the AEIs of those foals statistically to the sane sire/different broodmare sire as a control.

Even to do this on demand for one sire and broodmare you need to do all the base calculations. I would not recommend this since getting a fairly accurate AEI approximation into the game had performance implications.

And for a game based on fantasy and numbers, I think this is well enough. However, in real life I preferred to go look at the horse's structures. And even then life gets you. One longer backed scopey timber jump (chases) built mare was taken to a Mill Reef son with jump ability when he was in the states for some jumping (hard to get to back to that in states even then), and produced a filly. Looked just like Never Bend though in build: stout, shorter backed, muscled, like a sprinter! My second TB purchase. Throwback the breeder did not want. She had the back-end bone structure of a jumper though.

One breeding maybe the Irish here understand better than myself. Later I took her to an RID (also hard to get in the states), imported Grey Macha frozen semen. He seemed like a nice individual. Got a lovely mare out of that, which my sister nabbed from me promptly. The mare is still alive and in light work, sound for flat or jumps, in her 20s. I figured I had a stout jumper, so went with the flow the genes wanted rather than fight it. And that was based on the "hypo" or nick information that RID stallions did well with Mill Reef line mares for useful sport jumpers. Worked for me. But I knew what type TB mare I had. There is data, but to me, little can replace looking at the horse. But the the game can't do that other than the three build types, which are already hereditary. It approximates other types with the detail trait bars.

So the same with the bars. Say one sire has a full potential bar and broodmare sire has the full speed bar. That's a nice match, should get a good "scoring" mathematically. But, does the mare have the speed bar from her sire? Best go look.

Math can only tell you her foals might.