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@haltanny I haven't considered it, but I don't really think about my bootstrap herd on a timeline. This line is my primary focus and I'm not very good about culling through my mares each season.

But hey progress is progress!

I also didn't have premium until late May, so I'm sure that's helping things move in the right direction.

@blackwyld thanks! That is an interesting theory and I'd love to learn more about it. So I hope someone does! I also know I haven't done myself any favors on my mare quality. I only had about half of my fillies stay intact after SBA. And a couple seasons ago had superior comp tested mares fail SBA. I'll just keep plugging away and see if this helps boost the line naturally. If not maybe it'll be time to really spend my hoard of IVs.

I have never particularly chased the top breeders, but this is what I remember from when I started playing.

At that time, we had a Leaderboard with the top 250 (I think that's right) stallions on it. Studs that were producing foals with 11.? PT scores could edge in at the bottom. My daughter remembers having stallions that were producing foals with 13.? PT scores, but never managed to produce a stud that would give her foals any higher than that. The players that were really chasing the higher PT scores finally reached foals in the 14.? range with, I think a few nudging into a 15 PT score.

So, I would say, that a stallion producing foals with a 13-14 PT range would have to have a higher breeding ability than the stallions that were only producing 11 PT foals.

However, only Ammit knows for sure, and this is only my guess at what was going on. It does take a lot of work and considerable time to get both stallions and mares with breeding abilities high enough to be producing foals with the very highest PT scores.

All of this took place before Exceptional Producers entered the game and before comparison testing for mares, and, my daughter thinks, not even for stallion. We also only had Gelding Advice for the colts, nothing at all to compare mares except their Average Foal PT that we had to calculate by hand.

I still can remember the celebrations when someone first produced a foal with a 12.? PT, and again when they reached 13.? and 14.? The breeders that reached those dizzy heights were the heroes of the game. :D

I envy you guys! You are all so meticulous and have done all this comparing and analyzing. I just go along, and if the game says to alter, I let it alter, and if they don't comp higher than their parent(s) I do the altering. If I like the stats on a foal I may do a GMT to make it blingier (blingy-er?). I'm just sailing along, here, blithely waiting for the day my first 14 PT shows up!

Sorry I'm late coming in to this thread, I've been writing a lot and worrying over my dogs (long story) and not really playing the game much so I've been missing pretty much everything on the forum. This is one of my favorite subjects in the game though, so even late I'm going to chime in.

First off, @RunFarAway, I loved Imperial Russia! He sired some of my first bootstrapped babies because you had him at public stud when I started trying to breed for pearl and stumbled my way into bootstrapping instead. lol I still have his lines in my herd and he was awesome. He was also a very, very high Star, so I'm not surprised you didn't get any superior sons.

Most of the Dark Star studs I've tested from similar lines and generations to Imperial Russia are at the very top end of the unboosted (that's important!) scale. Bird Star and Rogue One were both from that same generation or close to it, and both also had very few superior sons. From what I was told Rogue One had only one, in fact, out of a mare who was his half sister from a linebred Oops sire. There's a pattern there. lol Many Dark Star lines reached the unboosted breeding quality 'ceiling' by 10g and stopped being able to throw superior foals. I saw Dark Star say in chat once that it was part of why they weren't playing much anymore, they felt like there was nowhere left to go.

So as far as Imperial Russia's line goes, anything that tests 'as good as' is top quality papers, very high Stars and Golds. I would not be surprised to learn you can't breed superior anymore in that line without boosting. But! You can still breed for higher PT.

Much more experienced breeders told me something when I was starting out that I have seen proven in my own herd of bootstrap horses (easily half of my breeding program, over a hundred foals every season for the last two years plus) is that breeding quality and PT are separate things. The way it was explained to me is that there is a range of possibility in the game for unboosted breeding quality (papers/comparison testing) and another range for PT (performance/show ability). In many lines you will find both have gone up together so the high Star/Gold are also high PT, but not always.

I have seen many lines seem to stagnate with the foals just staying the same top quality with around 13 PT for generations until I crossed them to a completely different line of similar quality and started seeing gains again. I don't know why outcrossing worked unless the game has a factor for hybrid vigor, but looking at the foals my herd produced, I'm very sure that sometimes it works. Of course, I'm also sure that it often doesn't. lol I went through a lot of out-cross colts who compared as good as my Bird lines before I finally found a line that actually 'nicked' well and produced higher PT.

So yeah, PT is no guarantee of quality and vice versa. You can breed top-end horses who compare as good as or superior to everything and still have a PT in the low 12 range. You can also breed horses who compare as good as a 13.5+PT horse and have a low 12 PT but then throw foals who are reliably higher PT. But! You can also breed a foal with a 13.7 PT and have it test worse than their 12.3 PT parent, 'cause I've seen that too.

Breeding for high papers and breeding for PT are two different things, and breeding for both is much harder than it looks unless you boost.

My boots are mostly Surfer Bird/Skip Jack/Oops lines crossed with the exceptional (truly! ;;) ) Heimdalls Gossip line, which has reliably given me foals at or near the top end of the paper range who are in the 13 PT range and still edging PT up a little higher each gen. They test well against every top line I've been able to buy foals from (there's a method to my colt packrat tendencies, honestly!) even though they are not in the top PT ranges very often.

Just recently I've started experimenting with boosted lines and brought in a few horses from Wildwood Acres' awesome boosted boys Falkaur The Betrayer, Requiem, and Lessons From Konick, which are also Dark Star based for the most part, wanting to see how they would cross with my DS-based boot herd. The results have sometimes tested superior to my high unboosted lines, but not always. Every once in a while I get a super low one from two really nice parents just to remind me I'm always going to be learning. lol

After making a few generations of crosses to boosted lines though, I'm starting to see definite trends. Bloodlines with no boosting seem to reach a peak paper level where nothing tests superior but PT will still slowly creep upwards if you keep breeding the top PT horses of that line.

I had two unboosted lines that I've fully merged now where almost all of the colts test AGA each other, but PT is still very slowly edging up. I finally got one superior from the line, and going by the testing I have done on him and his foals, I'm very sure he is not superior to his sire by much. He often has siblings or sons who are AGA him that test AGA his sire too.

BS S Gossip Rogue

Gossip Rogue's top PT foal from unboosted lines is this colt, who tests AGA both Gossip Rogue and Gossip Rogue's sire even though Gossip Rogue is STS, putting this colt right in the middle, I think. Maybe. Probably.

BS A Gossip Rogue Rae

Gossip Rogue's top PT foal so far is from a boosted line mare and was best of pasture out of 130 boot foals, but her PT is only .2 higher. She tests AGA her dam, who has tested superior to the very high Gold unboosted mares I've tested her against so far.

BS G1 Rogue Fairy Gossip

And then there's this girl, who is boosted on both sides of her pedigree and has the highest PT in my herd but comparison tests lower than I expected. Her AFPT after one foal makes it look like she's not going to throw her high PT, but I have hopes for her next season.

BS GS Falkaur Bird EDs2

Falkaur Bird's 13.9 PT half sib Falkaurs Rogue, also from boosted horses, will sire her next foal and I'm really hoping to break 14 PT.

BS A1 Falkaurs Rogue

I really want to get my Rogue/Bird/Gossip line up over 14 PT without any boosting involved, but in the meantime I'm playing with the boosted horses from those lines in another pasture, trying to determine if the boosting carries on down the line or fades back to the unboosted maximum after a couple generations. Only time and breeding will tell!

I am convinced that boosting adds not only to breeding ability but also PT. If you look through the lines of those boosted-line horses above, you'll see many of them are lines I've been breeding a long time without getting the jumps in PT that you see in the boosted horses and their foals.

TL;DR of this? If you just want higher PT on lines that already have high papers, doing a 5 percent boost can get you there. If you want to breed for higher PT it's a lot harder, but I'd try bringing in horses of similar quality from completely different lines.

I just want to say thank you to anyone that sells intact (even if untested) high PT horses for a reasonable amount. They definitely are easier to find and purchase on Forest than on Bluegrass and as a newer person my Forest herd overall is better than my Bluegrass herd. And then there's Mesa where we're all starting from scratch! I actually don't know much about improving lines because I've added bootstrap horses on both of these servers so Mesa is fun right now where we're all down there in the 10s and occasionally 11s! I'd be more tempted to do boosting there to be honest because there are no significantly better horses to buy than the ones I bred myself.

@confluencefarms I only really test the colts I get, and only test a handful of mares. Other than that I mostly just let the game decide who stays intact via BA and now SBA.

@justa I'm so glad that you loved him too! He was an awesome sire. I always figured that he was an extremely high star, but this is the first it's been confirmed for me. I just wish that I had saved straws from him. I thought that I had, but apparently not. Thanks for all the great insight!

I have noticed a slight drop off in PT score growth the last few seasons. With papering is high as its going to get, I'll change tracks and work diligently to increase PT scores. I fortunately received a pair of colts who are superior to Noble and AGA Doom. I really like Volcanic Death out of the 2. I was going to give Noble and put Coin in until Doom is of age, but maybe I'd be better off giving Volcanic the pasture time instead.


Volcanic Death KP

@pfrsue thanks! I'm good for the moment - more straws than I know what to do with! But I'll definitely keep that in mind!