Panther, you're completely right. This really shouldn't be happening. Its very rare for a top class 2yo to be retired to stud. It can happen but even then its more likely to be sprint bred types. Milers/Middle distance types would never be retired without having the chance of adding top G1(s) to their CV during a complete 3yo campaign thus making them more attractive as a stud prospect.

Panther, you're completely right. This really shouldn't be happening. Its very rare for a top class 2yo to be retired to stud. It can happen but even then its more likely to be sprint bred types. Milers/Middle distance types would never be retired without having the chance of adding top G1(s) to their CV during a complete 3yo campaign thus making them more attractive as a stud prospect.

The last patch should have significantly increased the numbers of top or group performing 2yos remaining in training. I'm happy with more top 2yo continuing to 3 as it imporves the quality of the top races. It can be tweaked further.

Hi Mark, are you referring to a new patch 0.116, or the last patch 0.115? The test results that I posted in the last post on page one of this thread were using patch 0.115, and as you can see it’s still a long way short of where it should be.

Do u know why that happened that year, it's because all the horses that was in the original start got old and when they got to a certain age the computer retires them and so the computer has to pick a load of horses to replace them. I think there's not enough sire now and every year there should be a certain amount of new ones so they don't get old together then have a massive cull in one season. There's a massive problem with my second country because the horses are not getting replaced and they will all go out together and after a certain age they are useless to bred to anyways. One problem I see is group1 fillies never ( 1 in a million) get bred to a group1 colt, not sure if it's done on purpose. If a sire hasn't produced the goods by 10 then they are the ones who should get cut but it's random and normally they replace a young one with a young one and the old ones keep going until the cut of date.

It wasn’t just that year though. As I also mentioned, the race histories for the top G1 races during the simulated period showed that more than half of the winners of races like the Dewhurst and RP Trophy are still retiring as 2yo. Perhaps Mark needs to increase the number of horses retiring to stud as 3yo and 4yo, which is a lot more realistic than so many top horses retiring at 2yo.

Regarding the issue of older sires not being as good for breeding, this is surely something else that needs to be looked at? In real life, Galileo is still producing high quality offspring after many years. Trying to solve this issue by having another element of the game (2yos retiring) being completely unrealistic is surely not the best way to go. I’d rather have both of these things working as they would in real life.

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Absolutely. SO7 is the best game in the series by a long way. I’m loving it.

Yeah, I think the issue of top class 2yo retiring is probably is more of a problem in the UK-based game, as there are far more Group-level 2yo races. Just really frustrating to see all the top 2yo disappearing!

When I have a game tonight i'll keep a eye out to see how many 2 go to stud. One thing i've noticed since I updated my game to 15 and that is my second country Oz is that their 2yo only race in their country where they used to come and race in my main country the US.

. Well there were 3 in my season and the next season there were two.

Only had a chance to play the game for a short while this evening, but from what I saw, the latest patch 0.116 has made a significant difference. Much better now than it was before, with top class 2yo staying in training. Will try to do some more AI horse progression testing over the next few days and the bank holiday weekend.

One thing I did notice when I had a quick scan through the horses being retired each year is that quite a few classic-winning horses are being "sold abroad", rather than being retired to stud. I simmed 10 years, then quickly worked my way through the three following seasons to have a look at the list of horses leaving the game each year. I noticed a few Derby, Guineas and St Leger winners amongst the horses being "sold abroad" and leaving the game completely, rather than going to stud. This mostly affects colts\stallions. Obviously no issues with mares, as far more of them are needed at stud, so all the top mares tend to make it. Would be good to see classic winners making it to stud more often than not.