I cannot win any race above a seller or claiming race at all. I got a horse rated 100 but the horse cannot win at all. I have never won a hurdle race at all. I got it on auto training. Everyone else is saying the game is easy on Hard level but for me is impossible. I deleted all my games in frustration. My horse forms are like 3002240. Am I cursed or jinxed?

really not sure what your doing mate, l just literally yesterday started new game due to adding a new schedule and i have had 4 group 1 winners and im on second season. Cant win a hcap???? Have not got a clue pal

I think you just should start a new game. The same happened to me. All the horses I bought on auction were rubbish despite having superb times in their sellers. Ended up deleting the savegame and start over.
The result: Immediate success and all my horses in the stable at the moment (17) have won races before june.

Yeah luck of the draw. First game I played I had graded winners then the next 3 games I am racing in selling races. Auction horses are worse in SO4 than SO3. I don't know why the highest selling horse is now $280,000 when it was over $900,000 in SO4. It looks like all the best horses were taken out of the auction.

Jk l have bought horses in auction at beginning of season 450,000+ and in game auction paid well over 1.2 million

Can anyone explain why this happens? I have 3 SO3 games going, UK jumps and flat, US and Australian. The first two have regular group winners after about 3 seasons, the australian game took about 15 seasons for the stable to be at the top and getting regular top class horses.

So, can anyone explain why this is? It is clear that most of us understand what is required to get a decent horse, and which will do well. So are we saying that it is just the luck of the draw and the game can give us dross for ten seasons and we can sit there watching our horses trailing in 6th every race? Is that us playing the game or the game playing us?

Sure, there are always races where you can get easy money by entering horses just for the prize money. But if the game dictates that you get nothing decent for 3 seasons, that is that. This is why I think that the player should be able to put bids in for any horse in the game. Some would be not for sale at any cost, but at least you feel as if you are influencing things a bit more than simply making the best of what you are given. The game dictates the going, which seems to often turn against your horse just before the race, it dictates how good your home bred horses are, even two group winners can produces rubbish, you don't know what you are buying in the 2 year old auction and you have no control over what you get in the post race auctions. The option to make an offer for horses in the game ought to be added to any future releases.

Out of interest, I've seen many Football Manager comparisons on here, which are, frankly, ridiculous, but most football manager releases come with some kind of game guide, suggesting that there is something at work, rather than just the 'luck of the draw', although luck certainly comes into it with that game. Has anyone ever written a game guide for this? Does anyone have a system that definitely gets results or do we all have to wait until the game decides we will get an animal that will give us a chance of getting somewhere?

"Is that us playing the game or the game playing us? "

Gab, I'm so glad to see somebody else say this. I thought it was just me and I thought that I was becoming paranoid.

I must say straightaway that I'm only a casual leisure time player; I love breeding my own horses & I love playing games that last many seasons. My idealised objective is to have a stable full of top class horses all with nice strings of 1s beside their name. I like to try to mop up all the English/Irish classics in one season; I try to win all the feature races at Royal Ascot; that sort of thing. In short, when I'm playing with my toy horses I want to use my skill & experience to place then with exquisite precision so that they win. And if they don't win, then I need to be able to understand why.

To do this, the game needs to provide us with certain tools and those tools need to be reasonably precise and accurate. Examples of such tools would be the feedback from Head Lad & jockey; the speed, stamina & acceleration bars, the horse's stated average best distance and the ratings. Whether by accident or design, all the tools provided in this version are about as much use as a jelly drill.

The head lad has obviously been playing with playing with the fairies and his defects have been covered already. The ratings likewise. But I'm also becoming frustrated with those bars - far too often, particularly with developing 2-yr-olds, the bars show the animal as wanting e.g. 5/6f & then when you run them at that distance you are told that they need further. And the bars still show them as being 5/6f horses.

The average best indicator has also become less useful; indeed almost capricious. Two examples:
i] a few seasons ago I bought three £460K 2-yr-olds in the pre-season auction; mid way through their 3-yr-old season and they all turn out to want 1m7f. Ideal!!! I detest 1m7f horses, always have. Why on earth are there so many of them in the game?

ii] Last year I bought three similar 6f 2-y-olds; now in early summer as 3-yr-olds, (we've just finished an abortion of a Royal Ascot meeting), and two of the three already want 7f. My second least favourite distance.

The home gallops? Nice to look at & play with at first but you soon realise that they bear little relation to a horses performance on the track. Worst example so far, (I'm in season 6 by the way) would be a 3-yr-old who ran 67.03 over six furlongs on the gallops. On the track? Well, I did manage to get a small conditions race out of him the year after.

What's the point I keep asking myself; what's the point?

I'm still not sure whether the game actively cheats against the player on a day to day basis, but it certainly gives itself some almighty advantages. This year we have one of those game bred superhorses on the go; equally effective at 1m and 10f; my multi g1 winning miler & 10f horses can get close but have no chance of beating it.

And that would be fair enough; it's a better horse than mine. In the past I would learn my lesson & avoid it in the future. Not now. This thing is running in every 8 & 10f G1. It wins the Queen Anne on 22nd June & is out again in the Prince of Wales on 24th June. It's paddock comment understandably indicates a lack of condition but it wins just the same. And then there he is again in the Eclipse on 8th July, not only out of condition, but with a pink dot also. Makes no difference as these things only affect the player's horses and not the AI animals. So effectively, I am barred from winning any 8/10f G1s for the foreseeable future. Great fun.

I could go on. Why are there so many colts and so few fillies amongst the better animals? I have G1 stallions sitting in my barn and nothing for them to sh...err... [/i]cover. Why is there hardly any going worse than good anymore? Got a very soft animal? Just send it off to the sausage factory now and put yourself out of the endlaess agony of trying to place it in appropriate conditions.

In short, too much deliberate obfuscation; too much designed to frustrate and too little thought given to making this game enjoyable. Sorry to have to say it.

I am playing the US game with the weak dollar. lol But still SO3 had a bunch of horses over $900,000 and those routinely could win at stakes level. I wonder why the horses are cheaper now. You are right about end of day auctions. I see some over $1mil. It is only the 2 year old auctions which are too cheap.

No kidding. There's no way that NONE of the horses are worth more than that. I used to enjoy the 2yo auction. Now I'm buying all of them I want and it's not making a dent in my cash. AND I'm only in my third season.

I preferred SO3's 2 year old auction pricing.

The game is designed as a horse racing simulation. If you try and immerse youself into the racing experience instead of viewing the game as a number crunching computer program, you may get more enjoyment out of it. Put yourself in the role of a punter studying the form and work out what's best for your horses from their races. Who gives a stuff about stamina bars, watch the races and decide for yourself what the best distance, going , course preference etc is best for your horse.

The beauty of the game is that there are loads of hidden parameters. That's the challenge.

Perhaps Mark should have put in a kids mode, where you get given all the best horses at the start of the game, it auto declares them in races for you and you just sit back and watch them rack up the wins.

mikeeboy i agree with you 100percent you are spot on it takes 10 plus seasons to get near to the level you lads want and the key is breeding breeding breeding after years of breeding you will start to dominate the game it is trial and error until then you need to learn fast on your feet finding out your horses capabillitys and min/max distance and what level the horse will be consistant at it does not happen over night be patient lads put the time in and it will pay off you will have a stud and a stable that will be the envy of the world and it will bring you hours and hours of joy like anything in life you have to work dam hard to get it unless you have a very rich daddy or mummy

I agree with parts of this. I think that as Orlando Beetle said the head lad and jockey feedback needs to be sorted as horses either don't settle or need gelding. I'd say this was a game problem as it seems to be happening recurrently in lots of games.

In a way I think SO4 is harder than SO3. There is much less set in stone. As with real racing you could buy a 6f horse and it may in the end need 7f or even a mile and although 7f is one horrible distance for a horse to want it does fairly frequently happen.

I think you have to use your intuition a lot more in this game. I think rather than using the average breed distance indicator you should look at how full the stamina bar is or watch how the horse races and decide. Although I think at the moment especially for horses wanting 2m+ the distance indicator is a little redundant as I've found that most of these horse want much further or much less.

I much prefer this game and when it is fully sorted I think it will be much more fulfilling than SO3. You have to use your brain a lot more and think about where to place the horse and how to ride it. It is much more realistic which can be frustrating like Orlando said about the home gallops not representing race form. This is just like real life, how many 2yo's are out there just beginning their training whose trainers are going to think "wow this is a real guddun'"because it's so quick at home only for it to flop on the course?

I can see what Gab and Orlando Beetle are saying. I'd never really thought about it but maybe Gab is right that the game must have already decided the result before the off. Or maybe it has some sort of random number generator with the betting odds representing how likely a number is to come up which, when you press space, it randomly generates numbers with the betting odds as a guide to how likely it is that a certain number is to come up. I think the fact that you can ride your own horse slightly disproves Gab's theory because I don't think the game is sophisticated enough (sorry Mark!) to counter what you might decide to do with your horse. In fact I don't think that there is even anything invented yet to predict what a person might do, let alone a computer game.

Horses being entered too often by AI trainers is a big problem especially as the majority of player horses wouldn't stand up to this much racing. I also think that these 'freaks' come up too often. How many Sea The Stars types have there ever been? Not that many, which makes the game harder for us. But then maybe this is because it is so easy to breed a multiple G1 winner the game needs to throw up something incredible more often to counter that and make the game harder.

I'm not completely sure what I would decide on this. But whether through fault with the game or by Marks decision the game relies much more on the player making their own decisions rather than the game telling the player when, how far and on what ground the horse should run.

Ive not read all of this of these posts because they are too long but I disagree with what I have read. Do you think when a trainer buys a horse they know how good it is? Real life breeding is the luck of the draw. Better quality horses will produce better horses but not all the time. It is about luck. Goldolphin paid 5million for a horse in real life. The thing was useless.

No trainer is given a horse with a specification. You get to know your horses. You mention about the game 'playing you' or us. If you know every single detail about your horses, you know what is gonna breed well/bad etc.. Then surely you will just be a button clicker?

Spot on. Couldnt agree more with you Mikeyboy.

Excellent post SuperCat. Maybe it's the intuition thing that's the problem. I remember hating differential calculus because you needed intuition for that. I also remember that there's a difference between intuition and just guessing.

But seriously, I think what the attempted discussion is about is the extent of randomness & chance, and the extent to which there may be hidden codes in the game which the AI can sometimes deploy against us to make the game "more challenging". [I've long felt that earlier versions contained a randomly applied penalty against Epsom Derby runners for example]. To reiterate what I've said several times now, I relish games with considerable degrees of complexity, but I need to be able to understand those complexities in the end, and to apply them to my advantage.

Just to go back to the gallops for a paragraph: yes, we all know that that in real life there are horses who burn up the gallops but can't cut it on the track and it adds interest to have the odd one in the game also. But to my mind, for that to work satisfactorily, it has to be just the odd one, and the gallops in general have to be a fairly reliable guide.

And just to stir the pot a little further on the question of the AI's interpretation of the race result in the visuals: the result of the race is not completely pre-determined. I know this because I'm in the habit of granting myself a small bonus by betting on one day's racing at the very start of a game and this requires me to view that day's racing several times. One or two horses win the same race consistently, but otherwise the results vary considerably. The same horses do not get pink dots, the same horses do not get boxed in and, over the jumps, the same horses do not fall.

On a lighter note, I meant to say that I decided to hassle that superhorse in the Eclipse as a sort of experiment. I'd noticed that he was a front runner who seemed to be getting soft leads. so I set a G3 7f horse, (I now have plenty of those!) to force to pace, with an 8f G2 horse racing handy and my proper 10f horse sitting just off the pace. I got the idea from one of our Irish colleagues.

Anyway, the whole thing was a predictable and abject failure. Except that I notice that the bloody thing is absent from both the Sussex Stakes & from the Arlington Million. so perhaps we shook him up after all. Ha ha.

Apologies for the brevity of this post.