HGG Community Forums

The best way to make money is to build up your show herd, they bring in passive income and all you have to do is show them twice a week (automatic showing if you have a premium upgrade). They'll make you money overnight if you let them build up points.

Keeping breeding stick is expensive. One thing I wish I did when I was a smaller stable was keep my show herds to make me more money. It takes a lot of work but for me it's been worth it!
I suggest saving up for barns and stashing away show horses :) You can also find horses with decent amount of points in the auction or sales sometimes

I have an absolutely massive show string, and I have accumulated multiple 1000 stall barns that the show horses have paid for. Here is what I did when I finally acted on a plan to make money:

Aggressively cull breeding stock so you are only breeding the best.
Start a Bootstrap herd as the core of your show stock. This I wish I had done sooner.
Do not do embryo transfers unless the horse is a core value to your herd, like you paid for limited genes on a foundation mare and want to make sure it influences your herd. I burned a TON of money doing that early on and I should have been investing in show horses.
Cull your show horses. I started out culling aggressively by PT and saw minimal results. So then I started culling 3yr olds by sorting All Time Points and then cutting the bottom performers and horses that tested Inconsistent. I would cull them again at 4 and 5. I did that for almost a RL year. I don't do that any more because of the size of my barns. Only then did I start auctioning 10+ yr old horses, and I would only auction the ones with the lowest daily pay out.
Take some time to search up other posts about culling and improving your herd. I learned a lot from doing that.

Right now I generate about 900-1200 geldings & spayed mares a month for my show string, and I do not cull any of them. At 10 yrs I auction everything that has not won an award. The majority of the horses that got me to this point were bootstrapped show horses. I do want to point out I have spent RL money too, but that has been mostly on restricted genes and pastures, followed by GMTs and boosts when I get on one of my horse create sprees. All my big barns have been bought with IV shopping.

Mistakes I made:
Not building a strong show string first.
I keep too many stallions (still an issue).
I cloned and added genes to horses when I should have been buying barns.
I did embryo transplants like crazy on horses who either had a negative impact on my herd or did not significantly contribute.
I sold show stock I should have kept because I wanted room for foals that usually ended up not being worth keeping.
I messed around and ended up with a collection of uneven pedigreed, but not bootstrapped, horses in the 2-3 and 3-4 generations. It seriously hurt my progress, and I did not realize it until much later when I finally started a bootstrap herd and moved all of those uneven mares to bootstrap and started breeding even pedigrees.

There are lots of smart players that have great strategies, so defiantly pick and choose from what they have done and build your own plan. My primary motivator was that I wanted horses on the leader boards.

You have a nice collection of lined, *Gold 13+ PT mares, so I sent you 8 straws from my 4 highest bootstrapped 14+ ***Star stallions. It will take a while to see the gains, but it will help get you started.

Primagina- thank you for the semen straws. What does it mean to bootstrap a herd? By having an even pedigree, is that working on breeding horses with the same pt and gradually building on that?

For me bootstrapping is taking my highest PT stallion and breeding them to mares to increase the PT of the foals considerably more. Higher PT, if I remember correctly, allows them to compete in higher shows that pay out more.

Even pedigree means having even generations. Foundation x Foundation, 2nd Gen x 2nd Gen. Some people prefer even breeding, but there isn't any benefit to it in the game that I'm aware of, other than just pride in saying I've been working on a line of horses that are 16 generations old.

If trying to breed for breeding stock, you want to breed according to their paper level to get a better yield of unspayed/ungelded foals, and take advantage of a full 30+ day pasture bonus. So you would want to have horses that are Yellow breed with C, and Red breed with B, and Blue breed with A.

When you say higher numbers do you mean PT score? That doesn't affect breeding ability so you want high PT score horses for showing but you really need to pay attention to papers and ignore PT score for breeding. I also strongly suggest not breeding inconsistent horses because you get lower PT scores/worse show ability and it's inheritable so the quality of your entire herd is decreased by breeding inconsistent horses. I also second bootstrapping to make yourself a show herd. You can focus separately on getting very high PT horses for showing through bootstrapping and increasing your main breeding lines naturally through even breeding if you care about even breeding. Just bootstrap away to make money until you get your main lines to where you want them, which is going to take time.

Yes, Bootstrap is bringing PT foal scores up by breeding high PT stallions to lower PT mares (or vice versa). My oldest Bootstrap herd is at the point I'm not even sure it matters that they started as bootstrap. Pinkie has it exactly right on Bootstrapping to make money and then reinvesting into your main herd. As Ammit said, PT and Breeding ability are not the same. In my bootstrap herds I focus on PT, on the rest of my herds I focus on paper level, SBA and Superior to parent.

I do want to clarify because Cheshire is right, there isn't a lot of benefit of chasing even lines, especially in later generations. Even lines usually means its easier to match breeding ability though, so that is a factor in favor of even breeding. My experience with uneven lines is that I was not having much success with getting breeding quality horses that passed SBA, and then later when I started testing for Superior everything I had in the 2-3 and 3-4 uneven ranges had a low rate of Superior to Parent compared to my SBA passed even 3g and 4g horses. (I'm sorry I don't have hard numbers for you guys, this was a while ago.)

Something else I should add was if you keep most of your breeding to your pasture mares only for a few months that saves a lot of money too. That was another mistake I made when I started playing, was not utilizing the pastures more.

Enjoy the straws, and I hope you get some good show horses to help your herd. I doubt any will pass SBA, so if you get some fillies and keep them intact to start a bootstrap herd make sure you turn testing off.