HGG Community Forums

Generation is how you breed evenly. Era comes from the sire, no matter whether it's even or not. If it's a foundation, era comes from that little number in the upper right hand corner of the page, which here says 5. The foundations will be era 4 if they're Expro, though, I believe.

Generations, on the other hand, refer to how many horses removed from foundation the baby is. That's how you make sure they're "even".

Oooh! I thought it was all based on ERA. (TallTree/WhiteMountain here.)

so now I have to refigure whether the horses I have are evenly bred or not.
OTOH, I was trying to figure out how you resolve having a bunch of ERA 4 and 5 horses in the same pasture. It doesn't matter then, as long as the stallions and mares are the same generation.
*slaps forehead*

Ok, need to correct a few things here:

Era comes from whatever the lowest era’d parent is, not always the sire. Era is important for the breeders club leaderboards and is otherwise meaningless in the game. People who established their herds a long time ago will mostly have their high point horsrs in earlier eras. They may still also dominate the color boards, but people with younger herds will have a chance to win awards on the newer era boards. This gives newer players something to work towards that is more easily attainable than some of the color boards (especially the top producer awards) because those will naturally be won by higher generation higher papered horses than what a new player may be able to easily access, and certainly than what they can have “homebred” from foundations quickly.

“Even” Breeding refers both to even pedigree (which looks pretty but may not be synonymous with high quality breeding) and even quality breeding. If you have access to papering, then even quality breeding is more effective at giving you high rates of intact foals than just blindly breeding even pedigrees.

I personally tend to focus on breeding the highest quality and even generations in my “even” lines below gen 5. Once I start to have herds of all Star/Gold, figuring quality will be more my goal. (I will do this based on Average Foal PT scores) Because of “mare lag” this means I may not get high intact rates early in breeding a new generation, but it means my highest quality foals in each generation are very very high quality.

If any of that doesn’t make sense, let me know and I will try to explain better!

I think what Cheers said is the best break down I've seen of it.