Old member, need tips

Older member here, I  keep coming back to this site trying to refresh my stock or do something different and my recent escepades landed me with a lot of basic horses I'm not happy with and ugh.

I want to start fresh, it just feels like I'm miles behind everyone else. Does anyone have any tips for me on starting good lines? I really would like to go for confo and stats but confo is just so hard to achieve it seems.

A few tips from me (to be taken seriously, or not.)

Starting from foundies:
- Train horses each (and every) day (even after the age of 3)
- Enter in shows when within 15 stats of grading up
- Enter in riding schools when not
- Cube foals and convert when they reach the age of 3

Starting from existing lines:
- Find lines with low NSS this is very important in today's market.
- Privately contact someone if you see a horse you like (whether you want to use it for stud or buy it- some people will be annoyed by this though so make sure you read through their page and make sure they don't mind to chat)
- Use outside lines as much as possible (as long as the horse has clean lines, low NSS, and high confo.) Trust me, you won't regret it.

I hope a few of these tips might help ya! I might touch this up a bit in a while if I find something to add. It seems like it will take forever to gain stats and confo. but if you focus on each one it is feasible and likely won't take as long as you are thinking. 

Last edited on 2020-11-21 at 19:46:13 by ᴛʀᴜQᴜᴇ

I think the main tips I can give are:

+ Foundations can basically always show and do decently. In disciplines where the nss tends to be higher on average (dressage/western) they can hold their own and earn quite a bit of cash. Given how showing is judged currently, a good competition foundy is really a fantastic investment.

+ For time vs money spent, it is always better (in my opinion) to set higher standards for foundations. If you want to build your own line, it will take a while to breed towards what you want. Save yourself the trouble and keep only the really quality foundations. I set the bar at 56-57 confo (sometimes 55) and no higher than 55-56 nss depending on if they are odds/evens and no higher than 20 for a nss stat. This will literally save months of time on the long run, as you can only lower nss by 3 each generation. So if you bred a 19/19/19 to a 19/19/19 you the lowest you can get is 18/18/18.

+ You can always save up credits to buy applicators if you end up with a bunch of otherwise bland foundies C:

+ Sometimes you can find great deals on foundations in the wrong discipline on the marketplace. Maybe they've already been showed/trained, but you can convert them to the correct discipline (based on nss) and save a lot of time on training if they're older.

+ It can cost more but: pulling 0yos and getting a full 100% on the young horse training helps a lot. You don't have to, but the extra stats are really nice if that's what you are looking for.

In terms of starting your own line you probably want to pull in even groupings:
1 pair (2 horses) - second generation
2 pair (4 horses) - third generation
4 pair (8 horses) - fourth generation
8 pair (16 horses) - fifth generation 
16 pair (32 horses) - sixth generation
32 pair (64 horses) - seventh generation
- from an older thread.

And i would say from personal experience, smaller herds are 10000% easier to manage. It's easier to show, train, keep track of, everything. I would suggest only using the cube method if you plan to not show them at all and breed later (like 17-18).

Again not an expert but this is just what I've come to find useful after starting a lot of lines.