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!

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?

Yes..he COULD, but he WOULD'NT, because of the potential stud value of the horse. He chooses the races very carefully, trying to find the most winning opportunities against horses of what he would consider inferior ability.
Thats why you don't get Frankel v Camelot.....two great horses who would have a lot to lose if they got beat.

I'm not sure that many lower grade horses run weekly.....although a few do.

It's nothing to do with computer programming; it's just maths. While the feature races often attract decent field sizes, the random races in the schedule often only attract around 4-7 runners, so if you're wanting horses to run far less often, many of these races would have to drop to even fewer runners, so you'd end up with walkovers and lots of 2 or 3-runner races. The only way to have the same number of races, but with horses running less frequently is to significantly increase horse numbers, which Mark has already said he can't really do.

I don't really have an opinion on your other point, but other people might.

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??

First answer in your research. I have a dual core, 4gb RAM, 1GB graphic card machine, am sure it could easily run a much bigger database, it ran Football manager and Codemasters F1 2011 no problem. Would it not be possible to have the larger horse database as an option so those with slower/older machines could still run it?

I could understand your gripes if you owned so4 but saying so5 isn't an improvement over so3?

To be fair horses run less now as there is more horses in SO5 then SO3 as in the database thus meaning more competitive races and horses getting to run less

Not sure about the orange flash as to be what you are talking about here explain?

A Blank newspaper isn't really an idea i would buy as you can make your own template in Photoshop + plus i don't think a lot of people's wives on here will be happy when there husband's are following them round the house with there newspaper clipping of there new star filly! haha

The idea of having Small , Normal and Large database is intresting but i beileve can be very complex to add and cause an awful lot of bugs as FM's did a few years back now(not right amount of horses in races lots of walkovers and trainers getting no horses are some things mark would have to work around.) (06,07 ish)

I cant see why there couldn't be a choice of database size on most moderns machines, as mentioned, the FM series has tens of thousands of individual players after all. This would be a fantastic addition to an already great game.

Yes it would be better considering there are 10000 horses in Britain alone and in the game we're trying to work with 4000!

I'm wondering if when an upgrade is made, if so5 will still be available for download so that there are possibilities of an upgrade being made more high end. That could mean more horses in the database and higher graphics. I'm loyal to this game but it would be incredible if the complexity and size was increased.