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I put a few Exceptional show horse mares up for sale for you! The first three are black mares and the other link is a list of bay or chestnut mares that should have a promising show career.

http://www.huntandjump.com/horse.php?horseid=2355657

http://www.huntandjump.com/horse.php?horseid=2496791

http://www.huntandjump.com/horse.php?horseid=2913903

Bay/Chestnut Exceptional show horse list

For the most part, when you spay for geld a horse, it should receive a boost in showing potential. The showing system is a little complex in that it isn't just win/lose. Each horse that shows and wins get points. The total amount of points that your horses hold is the key to profitable showing. If all of your horses have a total of 6000 points, every Sunday you will receive a bonus of 3000hbs from those points. There are some stables in the game, I am sure, that make over half a million hbs in showing bonuses! If you aren't too keen on getting a level 5 upgrade yet, I would definitely recommend popping for a few extra barns as you do need a good number of horses to start to become profitable. Also, SHOW EVERYTHING! All horses over 2 years of age can earn points, so don't discriminate on who you show! I'm sure there are many other players that could give you a better explanation of the show system, but that is pretty much the basic gist of it.

As far as breeding, try to start out with good quality and breed even generations together. Most people will not buy a horse if it has an uneven pedigree. If you can find a "Perfect Foundation," "Exceptional Producer," "Top Notch Producer," or "Exceptionally Perfect" stallion to start your lines with, that should give you better quality foals. Put your stallion in the pasture (I think level one give you a 1 stallion/10 mare pasture to use, so put it to good use) and put your mares in the pasture and LEAVE them there! Mares get a breeding bonus when left in a pasture. This means they are more likely to produce intact offspring of a good quality.

I have a stallion here that is an exceptional producer if you are interested in him. http://www.huntandjump.com/horse.php?horseid=2881879

And here is a list of black based mares that are for public sale at the moment. There are several that are black appaloosas. Mares

Color goals are great, but make sure you focus on quality as well as color. Don't keep a mediocre colt intact just because he is pretty!

If you have questions, the players of this game are super nice and always willing to help! I hope I've gotten you started on the right path. :)

Check your bank balance ;)

Usually Perfect, et al. are at least 100% for breeding ability. They are more likely to produce better than a regular create, though, like real life, there are always exceptions to the rule!

Oh my :3 what a pleasant surprise!!! Thank you, High five!! -hugs- ;) So, can I buy your black mares now? ;)

Also thank you all so much for all of this info, I had no clue about most of it and it sure helps me out a ton. Esspecially the spay/gelding thing that Gael4ce just mentioned! Very good to know!

I read somewhere that if your horse is showing badly, you can skip a week of showing (but mot training) and it can help the horse's score. Is this true? I have been wondering about it for a while now.

When the horses are trained, their potential show score is increased. Many horses will add three points to their score each time they are trained, until they level off. Once they get past Level 1, there are 10 points for each Level Grade until you get to Level 6. Those of us with Level 5 accounts whose barns are likely to be on auto-show have all of our horses shown twice a week (except those in pastures, the Primary Barn, and any barns we have chosen not to show).

It used to be that a horse had to have a score ending between 8 and 0 (28-30, for example) to have a good chance of placing in the top half of the class and making more money than the entry fee. However, Ammit adjusted the entry fees and class payouts to make them much lower, so it costs less to enter horses. They don't earn as much for placing well, but they do continue to gain points if they don't come in last or next to last (if the class assigns half a point for that place). Once they get into classes that have a lot of horses in them, the number of points for all places is quite nice.

Since the change to the showing system, with many horses being entered regardless of their base score, the chances of horses with scores nearer the bottom of a given Level Grade are more likely to place well enough to gain points that will offset the loss of entry fee money.

If you go to the Showing section of the left-hand menu bar and click on My Show Entries, you will find a chart showing the entry fees and the maximum number of horses that can be entered in a given class. You will notice that there are 8 showing levels, from Inhand through Grand Prix, and in each level there are 4 grades, Local, Regional, National, and World.

The average foundation horse will probably level off somewhere in Level 4 or 5, I think. The high PT horses you bought will continue training until they reach Level 7 or 8, and will gain more than 3 points with training, up to 5 points for the very high PT's. So they go up through the Level Grades much more quickly before they stop training. They won't completely level off for some time, but they tend to stop gaining so many points with training about the time they are 10 or 11, and just gain fractions of a point instead. At least, that is what I observed back in the days when I was still hand showing all my horses and was keeping close track of their weekly showing scores.

Very good to know! Thank you!! I'm really excited to start playing as someone who knows what I am doing haha :)

Horses which are created using your daily herd helper or the generic create a horse feature that you see before you activate the DHH are know as Foundations. This means that they have no ancestors that were already part of the game. If you click on the Family tab of a horse, you will see the start of its pedigree. If it is a foundation horse, all the entries on the pedigree page will be:
for the sire, dam, and all previous generations
Foundation Stock C
Unknown Warmblood (or sport pony)

The C would be the paper level for a stallion that is the lowest except Failed or Showing Only. Yellow papered mares would be the equivalent.
Unknown means that there is no documented color or pattern.

The offspring of two foundation horses will be 2nd generation. It will have a picture for the sire and for the dam, with the horse's name, color and paper level if it's been tested for either. Mare and stallion papering become active at a fairly low upgrade level. Stallions can be papered as soon as they are created or born, mares can only be papered if they have 3 or more living foals. The rest of the pedigree will look like the foundation horse's entries.

Breeding two 2nd generation horses will give you a 3rd generation foal, and the entries for parents and grandparents will be filled out with pictures, names and papering level and/or color if available.

Breeding two 3rd generation horses will give you a 4th generation foal, and the great-grandparents will appear as pictures with all relevant information available.

Breeding two 4th generation horses will give you a 5th generation foal. Now there will be a + beside the names of its great-grandparents (provided all the previous breedings have been of even generation horses). To see all the available ancestors, click on the "View Full Pedigree" link at the top of the family portraits. This will lead to a standard pedigree family tree form. All the previous generations will be shown, but if it's a long pedigree, it can be hard to read, since it won't all fit onto a single computer screen, either vertically or horizontally.

You can get a pretty good show horse out of that combo, but I wouldn't do it if you are trying for breeding stock, or if you want to sell the foal. And I wouldn't do it with someone else's horses as many players do frown on that.

It takes a while, but you will get there. Test your horses as you create them, or your new foals as you get them. The test are on the sideboard under the Testing and Papering section. (SAT) Showing Aptitude Test, Gelding Test, and Mare Advise are free (and Mare Advise has a (SMA) Strict Mare Advise,at Level 5 I believe, that is also free, which test how your mares are, but it does spay them if they are worse (Its like the Gelding Advise test, except for mares).
If you do eventually upgrade to a level 5, it will be cheaper to do a comparison test to your stud colts against their sire (only 4000 hb's where the rest of the levels that have it pay 8000 hb's), which make it a lot easier to tell if your stud colt foal is better or worse than his sire.

But you can also compare same level foals against each other too, as the paper levels overlap, so one foal may be a better "A" paper foal than another, where that "A" paper foal may be only as good as his sire, because his sire maybe a "high B", and he is a "low A", so that is an important thing to know. Someone had a chart about it once, but It's been a while, so I can't find it to post it. Just remember that it does take patience, time and luck.

I've been playing for quite a while, had just started getting star studs, when we did a clean-out in the game and got rid of lots of really old lines, and started over again, so I am still working my way to getting a star stud again, and it's been almost a year (I think :-? ), and I'm still trying to break the "A" paper barrier ( :P ).

Like as in... is there's something like B stallion + red mare = blue mare? Or something like that?

It's really good to see long term goals! This game absolutely requires having the mindset of being in it for the long haul. (Of course, with that said, I don't know if there is much of a market for show horses just because over their lifetime they earn whoever owns them more than they can usually be sold for. But that's a Later Problem!)

There is also not really a formula quite like that in place, no guarantee that you'll automatically get a better foal. Breeding has a significant random element to it: when you breed two horses together, they have a range of potential qualities they can give their offspring. In other-gamer terms, it's like rolling a ten-sided die every time you breed. Pretend the parents are both a 5: sometimes you'll get a 1, sometimes you'll get a 10, most of the time you get something in between.

Also there is a range of ability across paper levels. I have lines where I have 3 generations of A-papered stallions that have each been comparison-tested and proven to be significantly better breeders than their sires... but it still takes me that long to get from A to Star. I have another line that managed to go sequentially: C->B->A->Star.

Blue-papered mares are roughly the breeding equivalent of A-papered stallions. So yes, breeding Bs to red-papered mares MAY give you blue-papered offspring, but they're the ones that are at the higher end of the breeding spectrum for their ability level. In general, that's your ideal strategy though. Figure out which the best breeders of a generation are and breed them together and their offspring have the potential to be much better than they are.

Remember that all of the free testing options can only help you, never hurt you. Any horse that the tests want altered should be altered as they aren't your best choices for breeding.

Good to know! So you just breed the best of what you got and hope for the best? And learn along the way what works and what doesn't? I love that this game is so much like real life! I like the challenge it gives and the strategy and luck it requires! And I love it even more now that I understand it better thanks to you all :3

I think one of the best things about the game is learning about the Genetics. Most are from real life, though there are a few "fantasy" ones like Ice:

While it is "dummed down" for us non-geneticist :P, as genetic coding is vastly awesome, the way the genes act on the horses is the same way they do in real life. While there is still more being learnt about the genetic codes of horses, and as new ones are found, Ammit adds them to the genetic list, the newest one's being Splash 2 otherwise known as PAX3+PAX3+ (non splash) or PAX3C70YPAX3+ (with splash) which cannot be homozygous, or you get a dead foal. Its ok with Splash1 (the regular SpSp gene), but not with itself or with the other new splash gene Splash 3, which shows up on the same gene area of SpSp. Splash 1 will show up as SpSps if hetero, or SpsSps if homozygous, while Splash 3 shows up like Sps3Sp. It too can not be Homozygous, or you get a dead foal, but both work ok with Splash 1.

As you can see, it can get very long in describing the genes, but I find them facinating!
Enjoy!

You might want to tell us more about Nutmeg in the Non HAJ Discussion section. Quite a few of the players are horse owners, and some of us aren't, but we all enjoy hearing about the real horses in our cohort's lives.

:)

Papering stallions is definitely worth it if you can upgrade that much, or comparison test colts you are thinking of keeping. I like to see C, B, A, A, Star as a progression with every generation, each superior to their sire, so *Star by 5th gen. It might take until 6th gen though if all the foundations are normal creates, no exceptionals (so 3 'A' papered before a Star). The pastures will help though as on average the foals are better, if the mares are in there long enough