So, after many years of playing the Starters Orders series 'straight' (playing a single long-term game, retiring horses to breeding barn and breeding from them until they get too old or die), I've stepped over to the dark side and decided to try to focus more on selective breeding by adding a ton of horses from various saves into my TTF file.

Two main reasons for this. One is that the game just isn't challenging once you've bred decent horses and the other is that I'm curious to see whether a more selective approach to breeding will work out better than my previous scattergun approach of pairing up high potential horses without too much thought of their stats/abilities.

Thanks to atiggerx33's wonderful spreadsheets, I can now fairly easily keep track of the horses I've added to my TTF.

I'm still very early on in the process but I have a stock of over 100 horses so far. Let's take a look at what we're starting with:









Everything will be self-explanatory apart from 'CD'. This is based upon the Dosage Index used in real-life breeding (again, thanks to atiggerx33 for introducing the concept to the spreadsheet). I use the actual preferred running distance of my horses rather than the game's breeding indicator distances for accuracy.

Here's a breakdown of what the various CD classifications mean:

B = Brilliant (5f to 6.75f)
BI = Brilliant Intermediate (6f to 7.75f)
I = Intermediate (7f to 8.75f)
IC = Intermediate Classic (8f to 9.75f)
C = Classic (9f to 10.75f)
CS = Classic Solid (10f to 11.75f)
S = Solid (11f to 12.75f)
SP = Solid Professional (12f to 13.75f)
P = Professional (13f to 14.75f)
PE = Professional Endurance (14f to 15.75f)
Endurance = 15f+

You'll also notice a few of my horses have NH as a classification. These are just a few I transferred in from my jumps game to have a few 100 Potential horses to work with.

Before I start to post my progress with breeding, I'm curious to hear how others would work with this crop. Which stats would you want to work on raising across your lines first? Would you identify a base stallion or breed from various? If the former, who jumps out from my list? Personally, I feel as if Nalfaza could be a good starting point. He's 'only' 95 potential but 100 Speed, 100 Acceleration, 65 Cruising Burst and 90 Extra Speed Rating isn't too shabby!

Look forward to hearing some thoughts and then I'll update the thread with my plans and the crops of 2yos they produce.

Edit - Forgot to mention that line 50 in my spreadsheet is a bit screwy for some reason so don't excited when you see all the green for Musical Madam, it's an error.

Thanks for the update. After much gnashing of teeth and pulling of hair, I finally managed to correctly move my data across to the new spreadsheet The messed up formatting on the previous one must have been my doing rather than anything wrong with yours.

I like the idea of only breeding from one stallion each year and I think I'll try that for a while. I intended to do my current save under similar conditions but, as usual, I got carried away and ended up with 100 or so horses to race.

I'm looking forward to the breeding project but it feels like there might not be much to aim for at the end of it as my horses are already cleaning up all the Group 1s. Maybe we should get a little friendly competition going where our horses end up racing against each others? I'm not even sure of the technicalities of that but I do know I'm kinda bored beating gamebreds.

Cool, plenty of decent talent there, I have just bought so6, and am looking forward to breeding my own superstars also, am I right in thinking I can only breed five horses a year? I hope that is not true, as I have just increased my yard to 150, so I was hoping to breed on a much larger scale than that, keep a few to race, sell a few to the AI trainers, see how they are handled etc.. How did you breed so many horses in your sheet if you can only do five a year??

Hi newman,

You can breed as many as you like (as far as I know, I haven't ever hit a limit other than my 150 horses in training limit being reached) so go churn out those yearlings

Thank you for the clarification. Before I bought my breeding barn, I noted that it said capacity 5 horses, so I thought I would check. I had better start buying some broodmares then

Thanks for the heads up, I personally have coped fine with large strings in so4, around 20, but now I will look to turn up the numbers, and go for 100 winners every year..