Had to buy a new laptop and have to start new game because I started out on a tester licence. When the game was officially released and all the testers bought the game we were given the option to keep using the tester licence so we didnt have to restart.

I continued with tester licence.

However when installing the game on my new laptop it used my purchased licence and although the games load ok they will not allow exports due to licence conflict. Reinstalled using the tester key and the same thing happened. i am assuming its something to do with the saves being in the documents folder and associating with email. Anyway thats by the by.

I received some great advice from my mate Stu "Well your horses are all crap anyway, just start again"

So here we are. Now my question is this.

How do you evaluate at the beginning whether a save is worth playing. I ask because time is obviously a factor here. I have been in the breeding barn and nothing in there rated over 125, none have mega G1 wins. However 1 horse still racing managed to beat Frankel as a 2yo. I have never seen this before. Is it worth holding on to see if he gets in the barn and is any good. Does any of this really matter, Nothing in all time list is rated over 130 either and none of the foreign bases stallions have high rating or multiple G wins.

Opinions and tips please on how to evaluate if a save is a keeper in the early days. If indeed that is even possible

I base my new save on does it have the stats. So I look at every sire and I write done any with Pot (100), Cruise (at least 70), Xspeed (95 but i held out for 100) that is really high. Josh and Vinny told me early if you don't have them at the start then the Save will never have them.

They for the first few seasons I look at any new Sires and offspring of the ones you know are good. I also find that the good Stats might have bad race records. I think the 100 potiential horse i found couldn't win a handicap because every other stat was near zero.

Then its the normal, keep breeding to raise the floor for all areas.

I'm sure Josh, Vinny, John have better ideas, also Jim had some good advice I'm sure you can find it on the forums. As you know I also know nothing about NH

Hi Martin,

This is my approach!

You need to give it about 10 seasons to see if you find something worth continuing with. Buy everything you can in every auction (including pre-season auction).

What's worth continuing with?.
Pot, Xsp & Crb are the keys, once you have those in place it is establishing lines that perform well in the CK - doesn't matter how good they look or how well perform in-game - performance in CK is gold.

Pot - 87+ absolute potential at birth for flat (80 for NH)
Xsp - high 90s, even 100 if you are lucky enough to find it
Crb - 70+ if you can find it

With those as a base you should be able to start seeing horses with combined Xsp of 95+ and Crb of 70+ in five or so generations.

What I would do is start a new game and save it , then buy let's say 50 mares (buy all that come up ) that season and bred to all the overseas stallions in the first season. I never bred to the home country stallions ( bleeping awful) . Then at the start of the second season go through them all to see if they are ones that u can work with, if so go back to the original save and start , if they don't float u boat start a new game and try until u happy with them. At the start I always use the overseas stallions and I always buy all the mares. I never use the hometown stallions or the colts u pick up. I do this for the first 3 or 4 seasons then it's all down to my breeding, I've only ever done one and done, the first flat+ jumps team were from the first game I started and when I lost everything because Mark couldn't be bothered helping me with that bloody tester thing I only started 1 new game with my new flat+jumps team . Mark helped Paul get that tester thing of but not me. Perhaps he'd help u.

As my game is based on my mares at the start I always take notice of the mares I buy and the potential bar because some of these old mares will have sneaky full potential without u knowing, let's say they are 12 or 13 and still have about 50% potential then I know they are close to full at the start. It's the little thongs that make a big difference.

I don't know if my system is more complicated than others but Del asked for help a long time ago and he had better results from Jim than doing my system. To all newbies who want to get good horses u must find a system that works for u.

This is almost exactly what I do, however I advance 5-10 seasons when starting a game Back that game up.. Buying every mare you can over the first season, and breeding them with as many stallions in the barn is the most important bit. Get that wrong an the game will likely just go backwards later on. Once you have them bred (especially every foreign stallion as John says). Check the stats of every stallion you've bred with by using the foals you have bred from them (clicking on the stallion in the top left from the foals stats screen). Make a note of all the individual stats you can get from that game stallions, an if you're happy you can get 100 pot, an a very high cruise and extra speed, you're good to go.

After that you're just concentrating on breeding those available stats to all the mares you have. I just make sure I have kept all the good stat mares, an as John says, some of those older ones do throw up surprises. The breeding mares sales are massively important to me, these throw up some good looking older horses to use.

This is the bit that can be boring, just breeding for stats. I still always trial because no matter what, you still have to find Josh's 'JuJu', so I still trial all these. You'll still see certain ones that are better than others without the difference being massive. But once you get a horse that just destroys the rest, that's your horse, thats the line to use. You can still be breeding to the better game horses too with a good record in game to see if they have the JuJu. I just try to seperate the JuJu search from the stats search for a bit, then merge them once you find a horse that obliterates the trials. The trials wont take long each season as you wont have many horses. Once you find that JuJu game stallion, use that for a few seasons with all the best stats horses you have. This can easily be 10-15 seasons or so before you se proper improvements but if you're looking for longevity of league horses an good challenging horses, it's definitely worth it in my opinion.

apologies for the waffle Bit of a brain dump At the point of having JuJu an stats, it's just about keeping the merge going an trialling all the time an the improvements will start to be massive. An working on more distances etc.

Make sure you have plenty of Mares available in the barn at the start with decent stats, don't need to be brilliant, just good enough to improve on to get what you want.

Once you've found the first JuJu horse, the search isn't over, still breed with the best record game stallions as there's definitely another one to come, that will take it even further. Likely find 3-4 of these game stallions spread out over the seasons that will improve your trials massively each time.

probably ends once you hit about 30 seasons. I tend to find game horses become dead after that

First question is it a flat, NH or combined save your planning to play and what country? My approach differs slightly between flat and NH and I rarely play combined but I have tried a few.

Whilst I wait for that answer your first season actions are the same. Play on easy and max the game pool on the schedule. Then asses your starting horses, here you can either start over and over again until you find something you like or just ditch them all and focus on the game horses, more often than not I do the latter as waiting for a starting horse can be soul destroying.

I don’t skip seasons, since this can cost you a horse you wanted. Then you need to solve the money problem once and forever. To do this you need to gamble and you need to cheat. So wait for one of the early foreign festivals, if flat Dubai or Singapore will work, save your game, then go to that festival and skip each race, check the post race card to see what won, and anything that won by 3+ lengths is a safe bet. Crash game and go back to the save point. Ideally you want a few each festival and bet everything you have from selling your starting horses. Then bet the winnings and then again. Ideally you walk away with a few hundred million and the money problem is solved. Now you can buy everything which is what you need to be doing to find your bars. Repeat that step as required.

As said above flat game you want potential 95%+ speed at least 90%+ and cruise 70%+ likely from multiple different horses. If NH your focus needs to be potential and 100% by 8yo, anything 70% on speed and 50% up on cruise is workable. Factors like ground and enthusiasm also worth finding for the NH.

Then it’s just mixing it all together until you have the best of all three in one line whilst continuing to look for better. If by 20 seasons you have none of that delete it and try again.

Once you have anything even vaguely close to those best combined bars export them and trial them, and anything you export and trial you must keep in your barn until you know what you have.

Final point, don’t suffer the stupid game RNG when breeding you will go insane and everything will take longer. Just save the game after you have bred and before the turn of the year and the foals are released. Then check the foals, I only look at colts since they are the key to maintaining bars and lines. Get what you want carry on, don’t then crash the game go back to the save point and roll the year around again. Rinse and repeat. You will still go insane as the game hates to give you all three main factors in one horse but it’s quicker than breeding again.

The release point differs from game to game, and country to country so know when the aging occurs. Finding the bars is hard, keeping them and mixing them is harder still, and once your past a certain time period you will likely never see them again and next to never find any better. After that it’s just time and luck. There is no skill in finding bars you either do or you don’t so know when to cut ties.

As for JuJu I like Vinny said, tend to think it’s everywhere, I even think it can still be held in horses that don’t have it from their parents but can still breed it on. But the first time you find it and add it too a line the difference will be massive when you take them to trial, after which everything good will in some way or form connect to that one horse. And it can be in something that otherwise looks rubbish.

What to breed what to buy.

No exact science to this either but things to consider once you have eliminated the burden of money.

1 - buy every filly you can from every sale regardless of their bars. As soon as you can in game you want to do one breeding season where you cover absolutely every single colt in stud, foreign and domestic. Once you have a foal you can check out its bars by clicking on it from the stats page of the foal. It’s the first way to catalogue your starting pool of horses.

2 - early days even if I horse has not been successful check its card, the game does dumb stuff and runs 1.6m horses in 7f before retiring them looking rubbish, they might not be.

3 - later game rating is a solid basis when buying but that catalogue also clues you in to the overall pool. So you can trace lineages to support what’s worth buying. But duds can still have one high bar you want.

4 - once you have covered everything once repeat it within the next 3-5 years to sweep up horses that were in racing. I still do my all stud covers today in my older games, but it’s rare I find anything in the early game it’s key to not miss stuff.

Add a pen and paper or a spreadsheet to keep track of it all.

Cheers to all who commented.

Josh, I usually play combined and I don't think I would have time to do two separate games. This is purely so i have some new horses for next season as I can't port my game over. Previously i have just played the game in a realistic manner but I don't think there is time for that. Hence the need for a new approach

Interesting about not skipping seasons as i always did a few seasons at the beginning so the horses in the barn had some form and history. Presumably you just have to breed with a many as you can so you can see if they are any good as there won't be horses with huge numbers of G1 wins.

I think one of the things i was trying to work out was if you experts can just look at a game pool through the barn stats, top earning horses of all time list and course records and evaluate if a game ids worth keeping based on what the initial pool of game horses look like. For example in one start the highest rated in the game was 130 whereas in another it was only 122. I was kind of wondering if that made a difference or is just irrelevant.

Sadly u can't tell, the games are so massively different. One season I raced my 2m4 flat horses in game and one horse beat the other by 5L in game but it was the opposite in my trials. It swung 10L between the games.

I'm the opposite, give me a good filly over a good colt any day. I had a special one in my first flat team, my whole team up to 2 miles improved massively because of her.

Yes there is no way to tell really, you have to lift the hood, and it makes no difference if a horse has won a stack of G1’s if it does not have the trial gene or bars you need it does not help you, so game form is meaningless.

Some of my best horses have been fillies, but you can’t realistically hold a line with a filly, covering only one horse per season, the odds are stacked against you so for me colts matter fillies are just a bonus for racing.