Question: Culled foals & overbreeding

I am very strict when selecting horses for my breeding programs.
I try to avoid inbred or overbred lines as much as possible and I am quite proud of the quality of some my pedigrees.

When breeding for color or conformation it pays off to breed several foals from one breeding pair to select the best foal for yourself. Especially with conformation the difference between sibling foals can be huge.
Example: Foal 1 and Foal 2 are both from the same breeding pair, but the 2nd foal has 63% confo while the first one only has 59% confo. Take a look at the quality of the shoulders: A difference of more than 20%!


So in the future I will probably breed more foals from one pair to get the best conformation. 
I personally only sell a very limited number of foals and cull the rest. In general my stallions have a maximum of 3 foals and my mares only 2.
I will almost never buy a horse that has a parent with more than 5 foals, as I personally consider that overbreeding.


But now I wonder if culled foals would affect the quality of my studs / mares / foals for sale. For my colored lines in the old EV, I would breed several foals to get a desired color and just delete all the others. Deleted foals were completely erased from the game, while culled foals in the new EV still show up in the "view foals" list and they count towards the "number of foals" on a horses page. 

If you came across a stallion with 15 foals, but 10 of those were culled / deceased with no living offspring, would you consider that stud to be overbred or not?
Would you still buy a foal that has 10 siblings, even if the majority of those siblings had been culled?

Hope this made sense :p

I'm in the same position with my lines... breeding each pair three times and keeping the highest conformation foal on for the next generation. I am current just keeping all the other foals locked, in the hope that in the future spaying mares will become an option and I'll geld/spay them all and sell them / give away as show horses.

I just came back and I'm a bit out of date with anything recent (about the last ~6 months).
When I was buying horses from members, I would check their pedigrees and see how many kin they had that were still alive, how many had been bred, and determine if I wanted to buy them for that.

Now, seeing a horse with 15 foals would have been an immediate turn off, unless there was reasoning behind it (as in your page stated you were breeding for color and culling the foals).  I wouldn't mind at all if a horse had 15 foals, if only 5 of those were actually active horses.  Maybe place a marker in the culled horses names, or something of that nature, so it was easily determined, or simply state it on your page.  

I personally would not buy or breed to a horse with over 4 foals, period. But, I am a *very* black-and-white thinker, and do not think I represent the majority opinion-  just wanted you to know there may be a small number of us who feel that way! 

I'm also pretty black and white :p

At the moment I name them "Cull" and I'm writing a foal list in the public notes naming their number of private, public and culled foals.
Example: Kv. Oxheart Red 

I would not personally buy, even if they were dead. If they had the delete option in the game currently, I might, but seeing as they don't, I'd rather not. :/ 

Some of my studs show a lot of breeding. I sell NOTHING but my studs are available if they fit what you might be looking for to improve your lines. I feel every foal has a potential to improve it's line in one way or another be it color, pattern, or conformation. I change undesireable studs to mares and look for nice potential studs to breed them to. I will adopt the occasional undesireable for breeding (according to what I like to see on my horses) and just school them for money. I am still learning new things as I go along. As I see it with artificial insemination being used for a desireable lineage in the real world I don't view my studs as overbred as there aren't many foals out in the games general population. Some of my lines are almost cleared from general pop since some of my horses are nearly 2 years old real time.

Personally, I am not fan of culled foals because I will have to check every foals to see which one is dead. I like to take a quick glance and see the official number. Even if you labeled them as culled, I still have to check them to see which one are in heaven or still sitting in former horse list. The latter can be revived any time so I considered them to not be culled officially. I tried to make a suggestion about deletion in past but someone got offended and caused problem so I have to delete the post. 

Recap of suggestion:
Our current deletion system only sent horses to heaven but their records still are available. 

My suggestion was to wipe out horses without existing foals completely from the game. For example, if a stud have 10 foals but 6 are culled:

Current system will show that stud have 10 foals. But with new system deletion, that stud will appeared to have 4 foals only.

Feel free to make an official suggestion post if you want to. 

I always check to see how many foals are still living or have living offspring. Not everyone has the time or patience to check each foal, but now that horses have public notes I think writing how many were culled would help. I wouldn't consider that stud to be overbred, but to me the point of avoiding overbred horses is so that when I'm making breeding pairs I'm not limited by the horses sharing an ancestor. I think some people don't like overbreeding on principle, like it's unrealistic or cheating in a way, so to them it isn't going to matter how many foals are living.

If I'm looking to buy something, which I rarely do anymore, I don't even bother to look at foals if a stud (or mare) has 6 or more foals. Might have some leniency depending on if there's something really specific I'm looking for, but generally speaking, anything with over 5 foals is too much (but yes, I can be a bit of a hypocrite as far as my own breeding goes - when I breed more than I prefer from my own lines it's typically because there's nothing outside to breed to, either due to stats too low or already being overbred). I'm in the process of revamping & cleaning up my lines (yay for the current custom horse discount!) and doing some hard culling so I can get back to where I really want to be.

What is a culled foal?

@ raynebow001: A culled foal is one that has been sent to the paddocks in the sky/deleted from the former horses list.