Foundation herds

How many horses and how much money have you spent trying to get the herd you want?

So far I've gone through over 76 quarter horses(when I started counting, there were more) to get them culled down to about 10 horses. 5 colts, 6 mares(I think), and I'm not terribly pleased with what I have. I remember this being easier in the past. I've been looking for Crcr, Dd, Chch, Ff, or Zz. lol (sell me yours please) Why on earth do I get so many overo horses?


152k so far spent just on initially buying the horse, without the cost of spending them to the RC. I'm averaging like 13k a horse.

Does anyone genotype every horse they buy from the store?

When do you decide to use credits to get what you want?  I'm a small fry in this crowd and I would like to not use credits.



Last edited on 2020-03-12 at 15:35:25 by Aprilis » 3

when looking for foundies, i stalk the RC.
i snap up horses with good confo and/or good NSS stats

it often takes several months until i get enough to pair 16 (which is my preferred size of herd). That said, i have many many “sets” of herds all started from foundies, often in varying generations and ages that will eventually be combined. right now i’m on the fifth gen of my oldest set and will probably lock them and get a few more herds to that point before buying any new foundies. 

i work with a limited color breed (3 base colors + gray + flaxen/rabicano/sabino) so i ignore color for the most part, though i do try to breed out the bay when possible. 

i’m not sure what breed you’ve got but since i snap up foundies from the RC in a variety of breeds, i might have some in the breed/color you’re looking for! 

Mainly QHs and then a few tbs on a different account. So there is a bunch of qh in the RC from me and I do try to stalk it pretty regularly, but how often do you find a horse with a cream, champagne, or flaxen gene in the RC? I certainly don't put any there to my knowledge. I can't really afford to genotype every one. 

Majority of my horses are 18-16 yrs right now and it is nearly time to unlock foals and progress them. I was thinking I would like the foundation to be a little ahead of them, but I guess it really doesn't matter. 

I don't keep track of the money I spend on a herd, and haven't actually started a foundation herd in years. But I did spend 100k in the EC when trying to pull for western statted chincos, I ended up outsourcing the rest afterwords though. 

When I'm looking to add new blood I generally flop through sales or post in the forums with what I'm looking for because that's a much simpler way of getting what I want then having to deal with buying hundreds of horses I don't need. I don't see many Overos actually so maybe you're just having a (un)lucky streak?

The only reason you'd want to genotype straight form the store would be if you're checking each horse for flaxen, or checking genes on White horses, since the rest of the genes would affect the horse color name (i.e. Red Dun, Buckskin, Amber Champange, Silver Smokey Black, etc.). I personally gene test everything I have since I have the extra money in order to do so. 

I don't care much for color I'm more about stats so I don't often use credits unless I really like a horse for another reason. However if you're going to be VERY specific on what color the horses you have are, and that color is not easy to pull at the EC (like Seal Brown Cream or something) then credits would be a viable option to get exactly what you want. 

Like Sab I'm more in it for the stats then the color, though if the breed has grey I will buy them until I get the gg gene. My two Thoroughbred lines are the ones I have spent the most on because of this, with 100k roughly on each line. I don't care if the base stats are not what I'm going for discipline wise, even in the Friesians I breed, which only have two colors, neither of which is grey, so it would be easy to do so. 

Herd size, I used to do 16 pairs, so 32 horses total, now I tend to do 4 pairs, 8 horses total, so that I run a better chance of them not competing with each other too much in shows.

I tend not to use EVC to buy horses in a certain color or to change them (though I did do one recently, only because I really wanted her to get close to the character she was named after since her mate did XD) simply because even at the price I like to pay for EVC, which is 50k, that would make the horse 250k (for the color change), which they are never going to win back that amount in their lifetimes and unless I could get someone to pay ridic prices for their foal(s) I also would never get back. Basically what I am saying is I see EVC horses as wasted money. Especially if you consider that buying the horse with 15 EVC, with my price of 50k per EVC, is 750k EVD, which you will more then likely never get back, even on their future foals, grand foals, etc. With EVC going for ridiculous prices at the moment that could easily turn into a million+ EVD.

I just thought the overo and other paint genes would be a little more rare in the quarter horses. You definitely don't typically see it in real life. I would say 1/3 (generally) of the horses I got from the store would display some paint gene. The creme gene and getting palominos/buckskins is a bit more common I would say, in real.

Western started chincos? So when you are picking out foundation horses you are choosing the ones highest in intel/speed? I guess I don't understand is because they mostly look like they average 18-22? and 15-30 is maybe your range. By the time you are second generation does 15-30 points really matter that much? Saying that the horse has both 15 points in the two stats you need to train. Or do the other non-specialty matter more than I'm thinking?

I'm not searching for a specific color to say, but more of a variety of colors and genes. I don't really want to end up with all bays or sorrels by second generation. I would like breeding horses that each have 1 gene modifiers and maybe getting 2, 1, or 0 gene modifiers. Where you have a better than 25% chance of getting a gene. I guess saying that I'm more here for the color and stats somewhat. I haven't played in quite some time and my horses are lightyears behind everyone else. 

It's possible the percentage of paint genes is slightly too high, I haven't bought QHs from the store in years though so wouldn't know for sure!

It honestly doesn't matter nearly as much now, in regards to NSS, but that and Conformation were the two challenges to me, because color can always be changed with credits if I want to go that way. I had pre-recode lines that had ridiculously low nss, and I was trying to keep them as low as possible to give horses the best possible edge in shows. It's no guarantee to winning, probably not  abig deal in the grand scheme of things, but it's what I enjoy!

I feel you on wanting a variety of colors, I had projects in the past with cool colors that just petered out in the next generations.  I was particularly upset when I waited to breed two Chch mustangs for a day too long to get more than one foal and ended up with a plain Bay horse. Needless to say I quit Mustangs after that, lol. 
I do highly recommend stalking sales and asking in the forums to see if anyone has colors you're looking for though, you never know what you might find!

What is NSS? Maybe "no show stats", the stats not needed in the horse´s speciality?

non-specialty stats is the term, but they could be called non show stats.


Sabriel - That is exactly what I don't want to happen! I'm working on culling grey. For whatever reason, I try to preview the foal I want without grey and it usually works. I've been trying to save a year on the mares as well so I can retry if needed. 

I don't think I have enough game money on my accounts to want to try to buy credits or gene modifiers to try to get exactly the color I want, but I seem some people have foundation horses that are dominant in their gene expression or have multiple and I wonder how they got so lucky or if they had to purchase the genes. 

I have an account I can't log into with foundation horses that I would like to start up again so bad. They have such a better variation of genes. 

I remember when I started playing I bought some genes to make my herd look colorful and nice. Now I will focuss on stats and conformation, and maybe from time to time I will buy a gene modifier if I feel like so.

I think the most I have ever spent on one herd from the EC is about 1.5 million and that was to get a group of 30 horses that had what I wanted as far as conformation and non specialty stats go. I also tend to buy as foals so it does cost more because of that. 

I do the genotype test only on the horses I plan to keep. 

Just coming back, but I used to stalk the RC and look for foundation sales, as well as spam the RC for those I wanted.  If I could tell the horse had a gene I wanted, I would keep it.  Then I'd use the horse search to go through horses under my name, looking for hidden browns/silvers/flaxen, etc.  If a horse seemed to have one, I'd genotype it, if not, it'd get thrown to the RC.

You can search through your horses for hidden flaxen, browns, and silvers without genotyping them? Like through the horse search? That is smart. I need to try that out.