Many Questions About Breeding and "Best Practice"

I am quite new and trying to understand a bit about what the "best practice" is for breeding (all started by a horse I adopted that came tagged with suggested breeding guidelines).

1. What is considered/meant by "clean lines"?
2. How many foals is considered overbreeding?
2a. It seems most high stat/conformation horses I see come from lines with a parent horse with more than 10 (and sometimes over 100!) foals. Is it possible to achieve high stats or conformation without this? Or is it just expected/inevitable?
3. Are there any member groups devoted to going for their goals like show success, high conformation, rare colors, and money without overbreeding? 
4. When lines start getting long, how do you avoid accidental inbreeding that isn't auto blocked by the system?
5. Should I just give up on my "responsible breeding" obsession? 

Thanks in advance for weighing in on this!

1. What is considered/meant by "clean lines"?
For me:
- No Inbreeding
- No Overbred Studs/Mares/Etc in Pedigree

Basically, anything that will not give me hard time with breeding. 

2. How many foals is considered overbreeding?
Most players considered 5 or more living foals are overbreeding. 

2a. It seems most high stat/conformation horses I see come from lines with a parent horse with more than 10 (and sometimes over 100!) foals. Is it possible to achieve high stats or conformation without this? Or is it just expected/inevitable?
Of course, it is possible! It will require a lot of dedication and patience. It will requires a lot of careful breeding selection and time.

3. Are there any member groups devoted to going for their goals like show success, high conformation, rare colors, and money without overbreeding? 
not sure! however, I know that a lot of dedicated breeders would love to have dedicated partners to work with. 

4. When lines start getting long, how do you avoid accidental inbreeding that isn't auto blocked by the system?
Personally, I never had this problem because I usually focused on my private lines. In past, I usually work with less popular breeds so I kinda start to naturally memorized lines after seeing many of them. At a quick glance, I usually will recognized names and know right away which lines they are from.
Things usually become a lot easier if you stay with one breed for long time because you will start to pick up and remember details. Like, which breeders to avoid and common names.

5. Should I just give up on my "responsible breeding" obsession? 
Nah! I love responsible breeding! It brings on more challenges and often make this game more fun for me XD

Well said, Andromeda :D I would agree with that. 

Andromeda covered it pretty well, but I'll add my two cents.

1. What is considered/meant by "clean lines"?
For me it's no duplicate names in the pedigree. I don't pay attention to the number of foals each horse in the pedigree has had because that's just too much info to keep track of and if you're not spending $50k+ on horses to breed then you pretty much aren't going to find pedigrees without at least one overbred horse. It's not that important to me personally.

2. How many foals is considered overbreeding?
More than 5, or when a horse is starting to be bred super young, and hasn't had over 5 foals yet but obviously will by the time it retires.

2a. It seems most high stat/conformation horses I see come from lines with a parent horse with more than 10 (and sometimes over 100!) foals. Is it possible to achieve high stats or conformation without this? Or is it just expected/inevitable?
It's possible it just takes more time and patience than many players want to spend.

4. When lines start getting long, how do you avoid accidental inbreeding that isn't auto blocked by the system?
Keep good notes in a text document or spreadsheet (or a notebook if you're old-school, lol).

5. Should I just give up on my "responsible breeding" obsession?
No way! The game needs all the responsible breeders it can get. It really just makes things better for everyone.

Last edited on 2017-08-01 at 19:42:10 by SueHeck

Thanks so much for responding!! I will definitely not give up, then, and you cleared up a few things for me. Thanks a bunch! If I ever manage to get a good breeding operation going I'll owe you all a foal. :)

For me, personally, I care very much about clean lines (and agree that tends to mean no duplicate names or extremely overbred horses, unless it's something I have as a "project" horse/line) ...on the first pedigree page. That used to mean three generations back, and now means four. Beyond four generations I don't really care if there are repeat horses. Eventually it's close to impossible to avoid it unless you're bringing in new foundation horses with every generation, which makes it harder to work toward high stat, conformation, or even color goals, since you're basically starting over from scratch with those foundations.
I try to bring in new horses pretty frequently, so I have multiple lines going that I can choose to cross with each other later, as I'd like to keep the pedigrees 'clean' as far back as possible. But like I said, if it's not on the pedigree page for the horse, it's not going to bother me. (And if you breed your horses late in their lives each gen, four generations in-game is basically a year and a half in the real world! That's already a pretty significant commitment.)

It's good to have a slightly more laid back viewpoint! I know I tend to be a very black amd white thinker, so the concept of caring only about four generations back never would have evem occurred to me! Thanks for the insight!!