Tips For Starting Lines

I've been considering locking my current horses up and possibly trying to start my own lines. I'm not sure on what breed or any specifics quite yet. But I'd love some tips and advice from anyone who has their own lines c: {Like, how to pair them up, should I only focus on one disipline with them? Anything.}

Also open to suggestions on what breed I should do. I value color, so I'd like a breed with color.

What I did for my Morgan and Paint lines, was I just started out buy buying x amount of stores. I prefer 10 mares/10 stallions to start out with. It's a nice, non-overwhelming number and if you breed 2x you get your horses back. You could always do 20/20 and breed just once. Up to you how you like to do it for that.

My Paints I accidentally bought more horses than I needed, so I ended up with 12/12.

Because I know stats matter, I haven't focused on showing/disciplines for this generation, and will see what I want to do second generation. I have an overabundance of Hay Cubes + Sugar Cubes so I've been feeding Hay Cubes to boost stats, and will switch to the Sugar Cubes.

A lot of players will feed like I am and set a discipline, and then when they are done special treating switch to an actual discipline.

I love Miniatures, they have the most variety for color and marking options.

I feel that you should do horses in 2,4,8,16,32,64 etc. pairs so that all horses in future generations will have a mate. I pair based on color but with conformation as an important secondary consideration. Focusing on one discipline, particularly the most popular discipline will make your horses more valuable. However I've been known to have breeds with less popular disciplines myself. Also if you choose to to go the haycube/sugarcube route and don't plan to convert before breeding that your foals might be very difficult to sell.

As for colorful breeds mustangs, QHs, GVs, minis, and Shetlands all have awesome colors.

Paints, Vanners, Quarter Horses, and Appys are all breeds I'm in that have a considerable amount of color. I would definitely suggest if you do any of them to stick to the main specializations for them - Western for Paints and QHs, Driving for Vanners, and Appys seem to be mainly Western/Show Jumping (mine are in sj).

I like to start out with numbers that even out well across the generations to eventually end up with one horse that sums up all the breeding, so depending on number of generations:

1 pair (2 horses) - second generation
2 pair (4 horses) - third generation
4 pair (8 horses) - fourth generation
8 pair (16 horses) - fifth generation ** probably my most used group number.
16 pair (32 horses) - sixth generation
32 pair (64 horses) - seventh generation

I normally start with 16 horses, 8 stallions and 8 mares, and start them out at 0 years old so they have the extra foal years to gain stats. Now, when I start groups I can end up making 100 store horses hoping to get the rarer genetics/higher confos in my starting herd, but if you have the ability to use color/marking randomizers or are tight on cash, you can just make the original number.

Also depending on funds, you can start the horses out on haycubes and in a different specialization from what you want their final one to be. These horses can only be entered in the riding school while on hay cubes (they won't perform well in shows, and won't gain stats or bring in any money if you put them into shows). If you do end up with the hay cube method (my experiment is showing that it does gain higher stats at the low showing grades over all, and I still have to see how it does at higher showing levels, so don't worry that they won't gain as much - they're actually gaining more than show horses!). The price to switch back per horse is 10k. Given that you enter them in the riding school each day, and they net $315 per day ($350 - $35 training fee) each horse earns $2,205 each year. To cover the cost of both creating the horse and paying for it's specialization transfer, you would want to leave them on hay cubes for at least 6 years (but I would suggest going to 10 or 15y before transferring them). Once you do transfer to their final spec, you want to take them off of hay cubes and on to specialty treats.

I normally do foal trades with other members, and will breed my groups either two or three times. If I breed three times, I do 18y, 19y, and 20y. 18y is open sale, 19y is foal trade, 20y is keep for the next generation.
Since they do make quite a bit of money, both from riding school, showing, and selling foal sets - you might find it viable to start multiple foundation herds a few weeks apart from one another. You can always lock foals from earlier groups and group multiple second generation herds together to keep it simple. c:

And finally, pairing. I pair all my first foundation herds by confirmation, shown here: CLICKITY CLICK. It's pretty much about pairing up the very worst confos with the very best, which evens them out over the first generation, and then each subsequent generation should see an improvement in their confirmations. I also track stats of the parents when I breed, foal stats when born, and confirmation/color for future pairs.

This is extremely long winded, but I hope it helps!

i agree with everything nittrous and aglet said, especially the starting out with 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, or 64.

you can start them in any discipline you'd like. I know some players choose discipline based on store stats while others (like myself) choose a random specialty that is not the one i plan to use in the end, and feed hay/sugar cubes before converting to the correct discipline.

I'd definitely suggest starting with 0 year olds, as that's 3 extra years of gaining stats.

also Nitt, i love the way you've got your pairs organized. I do the same color coding but mine is vertical rather than horizontal and yours looks so much prettier. I just might switch!

Thanks everyone! I appreciate all the help c:

Question; For the hay//sugar cube method, once they turn 3 should they be entered in training? {Silly question, but I just wanna be sure}

Yep they should be trained and schooled daily on either cube method.

Last edited on 2017-01-09 at 15:16:36 by insomniaglet

Alrighty. Thanks!

I plan to start everything once a couple of my horses are aged out//I finally let go of a few. I only have so much storage for horses to be locked, Lols.