HGG Community Forums

A horses PT does not reflect their breeding ability, only their performance ability. A horse with good breeding ability can produces foals that are good breeders, good showers or if your lucky good at both.

As your lines increase in breeding ability you will notice that they are producing better breeders (higher paper levels) and better showers (higher PT). Using SBA/BA is your best first defense on ensuring you have good breeding stock, second best method is comparison testing which can get pricey! If you're short on funds you can start by just comparing your studs.

Looking at AFPT isn't a foolproof method of testing that horses breeding ability as PT scores are a sliding scale but it can be loosely related if your looking for a cheaper way to sort mares. It's not nearly as effective as comparison testing though.

Starting with Red/B foundations it is possible to get Star/Gold by Gen 4 but not super common. I also require all of my Gen 2 to be A/Blue at this point! Just to give you an idea of the number of gens it takes to get to Star/Gold!

Is there an upward breeding limit? Or an upward pt limit? Or is that just for size and weight?

On this server I'm very strict with my horses in order to keep numbers down. Everything is run through SBA and comparison tested to the sire/dam. I use pastures for breeding and only keep a stallion if it is 'best in pasture' - I do that because you need fewer stallions for breeding purposes. All stallions that I keep are benchmarked against their best peer. I have recently started benchmarking mares as well at the lower generations. I have just reached 8th generation but am keeping 'as good as' stock at this point. I start with C/Yellow horses, only keep B/Red at 2nd gen, A/Blue at 3rd and 4th gen, and */Gold from 5th gen onwards.

You can comparison test any horse against any horse.

The cap is roughly a PT of 14, well it's equivalent gold/star breeding level. You can boost past the cap though, so a boosted horse can produce those PTs around 15

I have a similar breeding program where I'm not worried about matching gen or paper so much as getting good babies. However it's not "purist" bootstrapping either because my whole herd started from foundation. I use the best of pasture email and comparison testing to find the highest quality stallion with all the genes I'm looking for. I also use the max out feature pretty often so I get to keep the pretty ones!

This leads to mare lag and a bootstrapping breeding dynamic very quickly so I don't use breeding advice on any of my babies, especially fillies. Instead I go by paper level of course (*gold over blue) and sometimes look at the lineage - if the dam is out of my highest papered stallion, I might keep the filly even if her sire is my midrange "cleanup" stallion.

Another thing you can do is invest an initial chunk of money into identifying a "benchmark" testing horse - i.e. a horse that is the minimum level of quality you will accept from the cross. That way you can just do one comp test for each horse in the future. There are a couple threads about benchmark breeding on the Forest server if you have an account there!

I personally try to comparison test against my "best in pasture" foals. Took me a while before I could afford to do that, but once I did, I noticed I had several foals that were sup to their dams or sires but were lower in quality than aga foals. (For example, in third the third generation, one foal might have a barely blue dam while the other's dam was a best in pasture blue. I would up with a lot of mare lag in my higher gens just comparing to dam/sire.

(Edit: not on this server, where I'm just a show barn, but on forest and bluegrass where I do breed and have star/gold even generation horses.)