I have to voice a complaint that I’ve noticed in the US game.

I’ve seen more and more fillies run in both the KY Oaks and BC Distaff turn around on one day rest and run in both the KY Derby and BC Classic. This does not happen. Can we please patch in a fix so that horses don’t run on 1 or 2 days rest? In the US, where horses use lasix, they are not allowed to run back for 3 weeks when on the drug. I know it’s a hot debate and I don’t intend to get into lasix vs non lasix, but my point is, horses shouldn’t run back in such a short time frame.

Thanks.

I caught that myself. It's more prevalent in custom schedules where I've seen horses run 20 times or better a season. What's more frustrating is that I increase the horse pool thinking maybe I just don't have enough running ... until I click on the Horses button and see that I have like 4500 US horses ... and 2000 are unraced. Maybe that 2000 includes the yearlings which tends to be about 1500 and unraced broodmares, but perhaps the number should be something like (4500 horses, 1500 yearlings, 500 unraced) if that's the case. It doesn't appear to be as I added up the number of breeding mares and yearlings in my current game and compared it to the number unraced. The values were off by nearly 200. It's a bit frustrating to try to fine tune a schedule only to find some races are void or have 1-3 runners with other horses are running 1-2 a week while there are a fair number of horses that still haven't run at all. I want to know how many horses I actually need but it's so hard to figure that out when my math tells me one thing and the game refuses to cooperate by refusing to run half or better of racing horses while overrunning others.

There are 100 US trainers. If the stable cap is 512 horses, then theoretically you can have 51200 horses for the US. So it's not a matter of a horse not being assigned a trainer. If I have 4500 US horses in my game, that's roughly 45 horses per trainer which is perfectly fine.

Either way, the game shouldn't be prioritizing a horse who's recently run over a horse that hasn't run at all. Seeing a horse that hasn't run in 300 days and isn't in the breeding shed is just as irritating.

Maybe there should be a setting somewhere where we can cap the number of races each class of horse can run (for NPC trainers anyway). Like we can cap G1 quality horses to 12 runs a year while a seller could be 52 times or something. These values can be changed depending on the needs of the schedule. A simple schedule might have lower thresholds while a more complex one could allow for more runs in a year.

If horses aren't spawning that can participate in races that have few runners, maybe the game needs to take an unraced horse that's close to what's needed and force change it so it meets the criteria of the race. It'd be like changing an unraced 3 yo that would normally run at 6f so they can now run in a 1m race. Or an unraced seller quality horse could be changed to handicap quality. Only change unraced horses.

With horses running back to back (like the Kentucky Oaks and then Kentucky Derby), maybe "blind" the trainer so they can't enter a horse within a week of the most recent entry. The only way I found to fix it, and it wasn't something I was happy with, was to have the Kentucky Oaks and Kentucky Derby run on the same day.

Just realized the trainer button has even more details on horses in training versus those breeding. Half or better of the horses in my games seem to never run which shouldn't be the case when I have races from 5f to 2m4f on turf and 5f to 1m4f on dirt with a few from 1m5f-2m on dirt offered every 4-8 weeks. It's rather problematic as it's not a case of there just being no races for a particular horse. There's no reason for me to have 1 runner in a race or void races.

There is no 21 day rule for Lasix. It can even be administered on raceday.

It appears you are correct on the lasix. Don’t know why I thought that. Regardless, my point still stands. Forgive my fake news re: lasix.