HGG Community Forums

I'm not an expert, but I would say that if you're looking to breed for high PT and papers, you're going to want to look for horses with good breeding ability.

There is a "producer" or "breeding ability" score that is unknown, and really the only way of determining it is using comparison testing. Some people comparison test horses to their parent while others pick a benchmark mare and stallion for each generation they breed and compare to that horse instead. Horses have a range of foals they can produce, so it is possible for high-papered horses to produce foals that are worse than they are, although I find that breeding in a pasture with the full 30 days bonus generally keeps the number of "worse" foals I get to a minimum.

One way to get a ballpark of breeding ability without breaking the bank when you're starting out is to use the breeding inspection option to paper the horse. Papers correspond to breeding ability but cover a range, so it's a little imprecise. It would be possible to have a high quality C papered horse comparison test "about as good as" a low quality B horse, etc. but at least it gives you an idea for fewer hbs.

I do know that generally you only get the very high PT horses in the upper 13-15 range if they are star or gold papered, so to a certain extent, you have to keep breeding higher and higher breeding score horses to get a high PT score.

For foundations though, Exceptional Producers would be a key exception because they can have very bad PT scores but will always have a better breeding ability than non-exceptional foundations (they paper B/Red instead of C/Yellow).

If you're looking for Consistent over Inconsistent showing ability, I believe that is something inherited, so you can essentially eliminate inconsistent horses from your breeding stock, although I've found personally that inconsistent horses can be good showers in the long run, they just have more fluctuations between shows.

Some players accomplish high PT offspring relatively quickly by "bootstrapping" or breeding a very high quality stallion to lower-quality mares and then keeping only the superior fillies and breeding them back to the same stallion, etc. Other players will breed horses of the same generation together, also generally keeping only superior offspring, usually with goals of certain genes, height, bone weight, etc. as well.

@ConfluenceStable ; thank you I wasn't able to find that post ; is there any chance the guides will be updated soon? i ve noticed some of them are woefully out of date with all the recent changes?

I love that visual! It would be helpful to know what those ranges are and what to look for before snipping a foal. are there any algorithms for that? I would like to keep my foals from falling in the ditch!! :))

By long-standing tradition in the equine world, the allele of a gene from the sire is always listed first and the allele from the dam second. This is why we tend to explain things in that order.

However, if the mare's breeding ability is higher than the stallions, and the foal's breeding ability is significantly less than the mare's, it will be snipped. So, breeding a B stallion to a Blue papered mare, will share the diminished chance of an intact foal that is superior to both parents that breeding a Red papered mare to an A papered stallion gives.