HGG Community Forums

Dont have access to it, sadly

Yes - you could test him against his sire and if he is at least as good as then he will be fine :) Although I would expect him to be better than sire before breeding him - I would be more worried about having 4th and 5th gen Bs and reds than whether he is even or not :)
He is lovely by the way.

In and of itself, “uneven” isn’t a bad thing. Sure, at first it’s easier to say “breed even and test everything” to new players, because it succinctly summarizes the right concepts for them. As you play more, however, you understand the game better, and you can see when that doesn’t apply.

In the behind-the-scenes numbers, a symmetrical pedigree does nothing special for the horse. Not a single bonus. Players just like it when buying a horse because it looks pretty and because they can easily make sure the quality of horse is improving at a nice rate.

The idea behind even breeding and testing everything is that A: it generally improves intact rates, and B: it allows you to make sure quality is improving as the generations go on.

Now, the thing here is that there are other ways to do that. They just generally take a little more forethought or hbs.

For intact rates, what you really want to be paying attention to is papering. Breeding even makes this easy because most foundations are C/yellow, most 2G foals that pass BA/SBA are B/red, 3G foals are usually higher B/red with some A/blue, etc. You can, however, match an ExPerf B stud to a second gen red mare and still get a pretty good intact rate. When you match a star stud to a yellow mare, however, the chances of an intact foal from BA are pretty slim. However, as long as the foal passes BA, you know their quality is at least close to the parents, if not better. This means that as long as the foal passes BA, they’re probably going to be a good choice for advancing the quality of your lines.

Next part: bootstrapping. You see someone take that star stud and breed him to a yellow mare, and they don’t BA (because BA would pretty much certainly snip the foal, since BA compares to both parents). So how can you tell if the foal will be an advancement to the lines? Well, if it’s a colt, it won’t. You have a star stud, so BA/snip him, and he’ll probably make an amazing show pony. If it’s a filly, however, you paper them, and you compare the papering to the dam. If it’s the same as or better, keep them, but if it’s worse, snip them. Then you breed all the fillies back to the star stud (or to another star stud if you want, but there’s no game penalties for inbreeding), and repeat the process. Eventually, when about half or more of your colts are passing BA, then you can BA the fillies to see which ones are the best.

The takeaway is that, in the game, most of the time the goal is to improve the quality of your horses (which is a hidden number undetermined by the symmetry of the pedigree). Of course, that’s alongside your other goals (that perfect gene combo maybe) so sometimes we let horses of less quality slide because they’re right in other ways. That’s okay too.

Either way, I would judge him based on his value to you, not on his pedigree symmetry. As Chili says, he’s got a lot of B/red in his pedigree, when you can potentially be getting star/gold by that point, uneven or even, so you’d might want him to pass BA anyways or look for another of similar genes but earlier gen/higher paper. Or you could use him but breed him to gold girls (reverse bootstrapping) in hopes of a higher papered colt with the genes you want. Or you can snip him and try again with another pairing. As for the breeding boost, that’s pretty expensive, so I personally wouldn’t recommend it unless the foal was an earlier gen from a pairing that couldn’t be repeated, or some other such amazingness. Maybe if a 2G or 3G ish colt had every gene you wanted in the world but failed BA, etc. As you get later in gens, it’s harder to tell if a boost will help, especially without the assistance of papering. I’d spend the money on a basic upgrade instead, because there are a lot of things included with it that would help you (and it’s cheaper than a 5% boost by a long shot). :)