HGG Community Forums

There’s lots of ways to go about breeding better. It depends on how fast you want to get there and understanding how testing your foals works to tell which foals are better than others or better than their parents.

Most folks shoot for breeding foals that are better than at least one parent.

Do you have an upgrade? basic or premium? The testing options you have available are different depending on your upgrade status and it would be helpful to know what you have access to to explain in further detail what might work for you.

First thing, no matter what you do, you should keep as many spayed mares and geldings as possible as show foals. Show foals are the foundation of your daily income, which will allow you to grow and do more in the game. If you have to sell show foals, sell those with the lowest PT scores or lowest lifetime accumulated points.

For breeding, you have a few options:

1) Aim to breed evenly matched stallions and mares. The easiest way to do this is to match the paper level of mares and stallions. C stallions to Yellow mares, B Stallions to Red Mares, A Stallions to Blue Mares, etc.

2) Aim to breed your mares to the highest ability stallions possible. So you would be looking for *star, **star or ***star stallions, no matter what paper level your mare is. This is often called "Bootstrapping." This is the fastest way to increase in ability quickly.

No matter which option you use, you will want to run your foals through the following tests:
-Breeding Advice: This will calculate the average ability foal that your two parents can produce, then compares the foal to that average. If the foal is equal to or better than average the foal passes. If the foal fails they are automatically gelded/spayed.
-Performance Inspection: This will give your foal a Performance Test (PT) Score, and Consistency Score, which reflects the foal's showing ability. This score is important for deciding which showers to keep if you have to sell show foals. Aim to keep higher PTs. Side note here: I prefer that my stallions and mares test as consistent. Breeding stock tends to pass on their consistency, and inconsistent horses will have a lower PT score, so it can drag down your showing herd's potential if you have lots of inconsistent breeders. Lots of players choose not to worry about this though, so it's up to you. I geld or spay my inconsistent babies.
-Breeding Inspection: This will give your foal a Paper Level, which reflects your foal's breeding ability. It's up to you how you use this. Some folks want to only keep foals intact that have a better paper level than the parents (ex: a yellow/C match you would keep only Red/B foals). My personal preference is that they should be equal to or better than their parents.

Optional tests:
-Comparison Testing: VERY expensive. Starting out I only used this to compare stallions to each other and decide who to keep and who to geld. This test compares your foal to another horse that you choose from the drop down menu. You can compare to another horse you own of the same gender, or the parent of the foal that is the same gender as the foal. The test will tell you whether the foal is superior, about as good as, or worse than the compared horse in breeding ability.
Examples on how to use: If I have 4 B papered stallions born in a season I might compare them to each other and see if one is better than the others before deciding which one to keep and which ones to geld. Some players will compare the stallion to his sire, and only keep stallions which are superior to their sire.
-Strict Breeding Advice (SBA): This is only available to premium upgrades. This compares a foal's breeding ability to the breeding ability of both parents and the foal has to be equal to or better than both parents to pass. If they fail they are automatically gelded/spayed. You would not want to use this test when using the bootstrapping breeding method, because the foals always end up somewhere in the middle ability wise between the high ability sire and low ability mare. They will always fail when being compared to their sire.

At the end of the day, no matter how you are doing the breeding, the key is in using the testing to help you find the best foals out of your group to keep as stallions and mares, and then have the rest be show horses.