Breeding Goals Request For Strategies

For those of us long term players who have been breeding for showing capabilities, how do you plan for your breeding pairs? Now that Conformation actually plays a part in showing, how do you go about pairing horses so that it will hopefully rise while your non specialty stats fall? 

I'm thinking myself to do gen one for nss, then gen 2 to conformation and then back to nss for gen 3. Would this theoretically work? Or should I say focus on confo and let the nss work themselves out?

Personally my main focus is conformation, as it is the hardest to work on and the second most important is NSS. 

I always focus on both of these factors when I pair up my horses, but when I get the foals (I breed every pair 3x), I keep the foal which has the highest overall conformation, even if it has slightly higher NSS than the other two.
I deviate from this only if the foals have very similar confo but the one with lowest confo has lower NSS as well (e.g. 57.89 with 55 NSS and 57.01 with 53NSS).

Theoretically I think your plan could work, but I don't know how much it would make conformation increase slower. I'd rather concentrate on confo only if you don't want to deal with both factors all the time, NSS can decrease randomly anyway.

I breed NSS first, but have been trying to take conformation into consideration. I kind of just hope for the best, and pick a foal with better confo than their parents xD Which has mostly worked out for me so far lol.

Olivia, if you happen to check here again, how do you pair yours for confo? Highest to lowest? or similar conformation to each other? I'm just curious what you've had success with, as that's something I was thinking about with some of my latest pairings, and had no clue what the best strategy was c: 

I’m finishing up my second foundation group of 48. 

100% only focusing on confo. NSS breeds down very easily. For example I already have a second gen with 50nss. 
You see much less movement in conformation.. so I think it’s better to start high. I breed my highest conformation horses together, and pair accordingly if there’s poors. I’ve been pleasantly surprised with my second go around and already have my third batch ready to go. 

Max NSS I normally like to see is 60, and I’ll allow higher for confo foundations of 63 or higher. 

@nebula: To be honest, I have an overcomplicated Excel sheet with all of my horses' data which helps me out with pairing up my horses.

But what I've got and may help you is that it's worth pairing up horses within 1-3 points of average conformation, because that way the foals will often have higher average confo than both its parents, usually with 0.5-4 points. Provided that you also pay attention to not pairing the weakest parts together.
If the difference is higher than 3 points, standard deviation is much bigger and you need bigger luck to get better foals (usually they're somewhat the average of parents but usually not better than both its parents).

Foundation pairs often surprised me in a negative way (because of bigger differences and standard deviation), but my 3rd gens have been a very positive surprise so far, so I hope the further generations' conformation will grow more steadily.

I hope it helps.

Last edited on 2024-10-10 at 03:41:06 by Olivia

I do an even 12 mares and 12 stallion breeding pairs for my foundation lines, breeding 1 tester between pairs just to see what they will produce and producing a tester again at N5 if I have the room, if I like the 1st tester group I don't worry about doing another tester at N5. I will keep the best confo and NSS foals from each pairing until I have even numbers, of course, I do keep an eye out for other foals that I can use as well for breeding pairs. Just in case.