Ah good, as long as it's not a glitch with my game!

Another thing was, how much did you pay for your first successful 2yo? The start of season auction's could probably allow me to pick one up for around £200-250k, would this be good enough to be able to pitch him/her in for some good races do you think? I know every horse is different, but as a general rule?

If my horses aren't good enough for Group class, I'll give them the old Sir Mark Prescott treatment and run a 1m4f horse over 6f for a few races, and then plunge on them in a big handicap over 1m4f.

I have been using Simple traning, but wondered which method you've had most success with? If I do stick with Simple training, does the facilities that are available to buy make any difference?

Sorry for the bombardment of questions...I'm almost out of things to ask!

I don't know about the cheaper horses in SO4, there was a thread about it recently though, but I've forgotten what it said...

As I said above I only buy horses that are bid for £415,000+, otherwise I tend not to bother. This means going into every horses' auction and seeing how much the other trainers bid for them, also, if nobody bids for a horse put in a £100 bid and see what the other trainers do after that. I got an English and Irish Derby winner that way! Most of my homebreds are better than the game horses but I don't want to miss anything great so I tend to buy all the expensive ones and sell them off as they prove to be useless.

I've always used simple training because I'm no good at the other one, it takes too long in my opinion. But there are people who only use the manual training, it shouldn't make a difference to the quality of horses it just depends on what you prefer.

Another thing until SO3 I always played on Easy mode because it was so easy to get the ball rolling. But in SO3 I used Normal and in SO4 I've only used Hard, except to start a game to find some decent flat horses which could jump which I started on easy, put all the horses in the game pool then deleted the game and imported those horses into my jumps game. It's easier to find a good horse on easy mode but I think that you end up with better horses over all on hard mode because the competition is so much stiffer.