HGG Community Forums

Hi darkangel, I'm going to try to answer your questions as best I can, but first I want to clarify something. There's no "better" here, just what you prefer to do. Everyone plays their own way, and that's the beauty of this game!

One other thing to clear up - foundation and first gen are the same thing in game lingo. Most people prefer to call them foundations. The foal of two foundations is a second gen horse.

Breeding even generations means you're very likely breeding horses of even abilities together, or at least trying to do that. While we don't actually know the exact breeding ability of any horse besides Perfect Foundations (100%) and Exceptionals (105%), we generally assume that foundations are all about the same level if they're not one of those two herd helpers.

When you breed two horses together, the resulting foal will have a breeding ability resulting from the parents' abilities and a random factor. So breeding two Perfect Foundations can result in a range of qualities in the second generation, but you will have some horses of a higher breeding ability than their sire and dam. Breeding a foundation mare to a *Star papered stud will result in a horse with breeding and showing ability somewhere between those, as the random factor isn't going to push it too far up or down when the other values are so far apart.

Even breeding is the way that most players who are active on the forum seem to go. Evenly bred horses are far more desirable to other players (though sales are not the way to make much money) and people are often more willing to share their own horses with someone who plays similarly to them.

Breeding unevenly is generally not the way people play when they want to work on improving their lines. Unevenly bred horses have little to no sale value as experienced players generally won't pick them up. That being said, I have a large show herd of very uneven horses from when I wanted to boost my showing bonus fairly quickly. It works, and it's a cheap way to get show horses if you have the patience to wait for them to grow up a bit, especially if you geld and spay them all right away to let them focus on showing.

I hope that helps. Please feel free to ask for clarification on any of this, and it's very likely other players will chime in and give you their advice too :)