Two of my main gripes are the sheer number of races the individual horses run during the season. That is just not realistic.
The same can be said for Group races.....you wouldn't get Frankel running 15 times a year!

These are some of the relatively easy things that should have been fixed over the years.....just to make things a bit more realistic. There are many others.

This has been mentioned several times before, but these are not things that are easy to fix.

There are only two ways to change the game so that horses run fewer races per season...

You can either increase the number of horses active in the game at any time, but in order to do this up to a point where horses are running a realistic number of races each season the game would require significantly more PC memory to run smoothly, and Mark has already said in the past that in order to maximise sales he needs the game to be playable on low-end PCs.

The other alternative is the keep the same number of horses active, but to reduce the number of races available, but again this is unrealistic, as it would mean going back to just one meeting most days.

Frankel could run 15 times in a season if Sir Henry wanted him to, how many lower grade horses run weekly in real life???

Hi Panther,
Not being a computer programmer, I don't quite understand why there would need to be an increase in the number of horses active in the game. I would have thought that a programmer could tweak it so that the existing number of horses would not be entered for so many races so many times....or am I missing something here?

I really would like to know the mechanism as to how this works.

What do you think of my other suggestions re- the almost imperceptible orange alert dot, and the blank newspaper, enabling you to write your own headline and small reports?

Are they hard to incorporate?

Just out of interest- why is mark unable to increase the numbers of horses?

I'm pretty sure it has something to do with keeping the size and complexity of the game to a level where it can still be run on very basic computers. I'd love to do some market research though and find out how many people who play the game are limited by that kind of computer. Can you imagine the possibilities if we could increase the game's size and complexity to rival those of some of the big game corporations??

I have SO3 and have read about SO4 and SO5 in the forums.

Unfortunately, allowing for the time period that the game has been out, the improvements have not been enough to tempt me to buy SO5.

Two of my main gripes are the sheer number of races the individual horses run during the season. That is just not realistic.
The same can be said for Group races.....you wouldn't get Frankel running 15 times a year!

These are some of the relatively easy things that should have been fixed over the years.....just to make things a bit more realistic. There are many others.

As a concept, SO5 is great....and I applaud Mark.

Another small matter (which I haven't seen mentioned before--maybe I missed it) is the small orange dot that alerts you.
That is hardly noticeable, and is easily missed. it should be made much clearer, so that it stands out.
As an idea, what about a blank "newspaper" page that you can edit your own headlines and a few words---then be able to save and print it?. You would then have a reminder of your great moments etc.

Hope you don't think I'm too grumpy!