Help Me Understand Showing!

After about a month on EV, I definitely feel like I am finding my footing! Yay! However, something that I really want to get better at is showing. I *think* I know about the benefits of hi/lo stats, but I'm totally lost when it comes to converting. When should you convert? How do you decide what discipline to begin with after foal training? 

Some context: I am breeding my own lines of Gypsy Vanners and I want to better understand how to develop my horses to help them reach their max potential for breeding and showing purposes. I also am breeding and showing QH's I buy from other players.

Another thing I'm fuzzy about is the strategy behind treating. When do you feed cubes/mints vs targeted treats like apples, turnips, ect.?

Thank ya'll so much for any insight~!

Discipline-specific high stats are the most important for showing - any stats not related to discipline should be low, because they contribute no value to the horse's showing potential. There's a chart here that shows which stats go with which discipline. 

Treating is often done with single-stat treats (like bags of green apples) that will add stat boosts for a horse's target discipline. This prevents non-discipline stats from being increased. So you'd feed a dressage horse either green apples (intelligence) or yellow apples (agility), and nothing else.

Some players, however, have a strategy of treating with multi-stat treats when a horse is under 3, in order to increase all of the stats as much as possible. Then when the horse is three, and ready to have a discipline assigned, they choose a discipline other than the one they want. Then they pay to convert that discipline to the discipline they actually want to have. This helps redistribute the random stat boosts they got from using multi-stat treats - the goal being to have an even higher stat gain from the redistribution that happens with training conversion. 

So that's really the strategy when it comes to using conversion. The only other time you really need to convert is if you accidentally choose the wrong discipline or maybe buy a horse that has a discipline different from your focus for the breed, so you want it to match.

As for choosing a discipline for your horses, you can choose based on which stats your horse is strongest in (although this will vary from horse to horse if you're buying from the equine center), choose one you simply decide on, or go with what's most popular for the breed (which you can find on the statistics page). It's entirely up to you.   

Last edited on 2018-09-05 at 14:22:18 by River

Thank you SO much River. Super helpful. I'm think I'll experiment with conversion with a few babies from my first foal crop. I definitely feel like I have a better understanding now!

OH another question! Is there a benefit to buying younger horses from the store? Is there a meaningful stat increase when you buy younger? Like, once your foal you bought turns three, it will have high enough scores to justify the wait to turn show/breeding age? If that makes sense..

It's generally better to buy foals because you have more time to increase their stats through treating and also from foal and young horse training, which has its own boost as well.

Thank you so much for you help, River!