HGG Community Forums

If I’m reading it right, it sounds like you’re having trouble getting horses passing breeding advice when you are pairing a star stallion with lower-papered mares?

Usually for bootstrapping (pairing a high stallion or mare with a lower-papered partner in order to quickly boost the quality of the foals) people don’t use breeding advice, or strict breeding advice, because the foal very rarely will pass either until you’ve worked your way pretty far up (that is, are getting star* colts out of a star* stallion). If the foal isn’t as good as, or better than, both parents, it will automatically be spayed/gelded during testing. Since lower-papered mares aren’t able to produce star* stallions to compare with the sire, they’ll always end up failing testing. Does that make sense? I feel like I made it more complicated than it actually is.

To be clear you don't get better goals this way. You just have a better chance of getting foals that are superior to BOTH parents if neither parent is better than the other.

Bootstrap foals are usually better than even breed foals, even though they don't often pass breeding advice. A/Blue will always be better than B/Red. I can get A/Blue foals out of a star stud and foundation mares easily. From C/Yellow foundations, I usually only get B/Red. Remember, you don't have to use breeding advice, especially for bootstrapping. I don't use it until I'm getting mostly Star/Gold.