HGG Community Forums

If you haven't tested all the colts with the free breeding advice, that should be the first thing you do. Next, assuming that you care about consistency, I would go through and snip all of the colts that are inconsistent. If there's one that you absolutely love and it's inconsistent, you can use 1 GMT token to make it perfectly consistent. But I wouldn't do that unless the colt is something super special that you don't think you can replace. Unless it has some limited edition genes or something similar, you will generally be able to breed a replacement at some point.

If you have a premium upgrade you can use Strict Breeding Advice to help you thin out your herd some more. It will snip any horse that has worse breeding ability than either one of its parents, whereas regular breeding advice won't snip something unless it's significantly worse than either parent. If you're like me and you only have a basic upgrade, you don't have access to SBA.

Make sure you paper all of your colts. I paper mine after I run them through breeding advice because that saves some money since you won't have to pay to paper colts that will be snipped by free testing. Personally, I always geld any 2G colts that paper C and any 3G colts that paper B, but you can have whatever quality benchmarks that you want.

If you haven't color tested yet, I'd do that now but I like to hold off on snipping or selling the ones that aren't colors I like until after I finish my ability testing. I like to do my breeding advice and papering before I snip based on color because sometimes your best colt ability wise can end up being the plain one.

The comparison testing is the last thing I do because it costs the most money. It's a big help because you choose 2 stallions to compare and it will tell you which one is the better breeder or it will say the two stallions are about as good as each other if they are pretty close in ability.

If your best colt does end up being the plainest one and you really want it to be flashy, you can use GMTs to add genes onto a lined horse if it missed getting that gene from one of its parents. All genes on lined horses only cost 1 GMT to change, even if adding that gene to a foundation horse costs a lot more. GMTs are expensive though, so make sure you are only using them on horses that are really something special. I used one to add White M back onto one of my nice colts because I really wanted to have that gene in my herd so I could take advantage of the pasture bonus and not have to use straws/public breeding. It costs 40 GMTs to put White M on a foundation so 1 GMT for a lined horse is a much better deal.