Good afternoon folks been a long term lurker on the forum. I tried to enter the online league last year but as soon as I entered things got hectic at work and haven’t really been able to put any time into the game. I thought S08 maybe out and thought I’d pick it up again then however that’s not turned out to be the case.

One thing I really struggled with last time out was breeding and trialling. I didn’t get anywhere near where I wanted to be in hindsight and it’s always hard looking at other people’s ways of doing things. I have been using chat gpt recently and I know it gets its information online and it’s not 100% correct however I was shocked when I asked it about the online league and what makes a good horse and cod trialling etc thinking it would draw a blank however it did come up with times to look out for when trialling horses at different distances. It also came up with ways to trial the horses and one area that I don’t think had ever come up before was trialling the horse individually to get an idea of an exact time.

I don’t know what your guys thoughts on it are however I will post a selection of the timings it said to look out for when trialling and I’m intrigued as to what you guys think of it and how useful the information is.

5f
Elite: 56.5s or under
Good: 56.6-57.5s
Moderate: 57.6+

6f
Elite: 68.5s
Good: 68.6-69.5s
Moderate: 69.5s+

The chat GPT app also gave examples of spreadsheets to use to track the horses, as well as different ways to breed certain types of horses to try and get certain characteristics through the breeding line.

Just seeing what you guys think as to whether it’s accurate this sort of information or if any of you guys have used the app to ask different questions?

Don't take any notice of the times it bears no reflection to what happens in the League.

Find a horse that trials well for you in the CK - that becomes your benchmark horse. Breed from it then trial the good offspring against it, anything that beats it becomes the new benchmark, breed from that and repeat the process over and over and over again!!

The only "time" you need to be concerned about is the amount of time you invest in doing the above!

To be competitive with the really good and experienced trainers you'll need a bit of luck in maybe finding that game changing horse, or be at least 30 seasons into your game save.

Good luck, and hope to see you with a few horses in this new season (even if you are off the pace don't give up, it is a valuable learning curve for future seasons).

I made the mistake of using times for trials. It ends up giving you horses that are better at a fast pace. The league is usually not run at a fast pace. It can vary greatly, an when the pace varies, the results can tend to be all over the place.

personally I think the best method of finding good league horses is not to have any pacemakers etc in the trials, and ignore times. Then you'll develop the horses that are more consistent no matter the pace of the race, an they'll be much more suited to the league races

I don't know if this is still true for SO7 but back in the SO4 or SO5 days when you could still swap horses with other trainers I remember seeing a post where some of the top trainers swapped a couple of horses and noted the race times.

I think the conclusion was race times were related to how powerful the computer that was being used.

I can't remember exactly what horses or trainers were involved but I think if it was 8f horses being swapped there was two seconds difference in times between a gaming computer and a bog standard computer.