HGG Community Forums

It does depend on who you are breeding the stallion to.

Breeding Advice, BA (as well as strict breeding advice, SBA) compares the foals paper level to BOTH the dam and the sire. So, in this case, the stud is a star paper, right? That's the highest paper a male can get to.

The paper levels go, for stud/mare:
C/Yellow
B/Red
A/Blue
Star/Gold
*excluding the showable only/failed

Within these, there are low, mid, and high ranges, which you can find out by comparison testing and some guess work, but it's expensive!

Foundations always start at C/Yellow or a "low" B/red. If you bred foundation mares to your Star stud, then the foals will almost certainly be better than their mares, because their sire is so good. However, in comparison, the mares aren't good enough to give the foals a boost to overcome their sires papering.

This means that, in BAs mind, since the foals are not better than BOTH parents, they should be gelded/spayed. But you don't need to follow BA at all. What you can do instead is known as "bootstrapping" in the game.

Bootstrapping is when you take a much higher papered horse, and breed it to lower papered horses. You do not use BA/SBA at all as most of the foals will be altered. You then take those foals, and breed them back to the same horse, or another higher papered one. Usually a Star stud is used to foundation mares, simple because they are easier to source. Bootstrapping is a great way to build up a herd of horses that will be amazing at showing very quickly!

Here is my bootstrapping boy. If you click on his "family" tab and scroll down to click on the link to all of his foals, you will see that I haven't BAed any of them. Because I am an upgraded player I can paper test (breeding inspection) which gives me an idea of where they are, but if you can't feel free to just colour and PT test and go off of that.


BT Ready To Go

You also can skip testing on the daughters of that stud and breed them back to him when they are older and get some really nice show horses that way.

Thank you everyone!!

Obsidian, your explanation was extremely helpful. Thank you for spelling it all out. I think I actually understand it a bit better now. I’ve seen “bootstrapping” around and wasn’t sure what it was until now!

I know you can unalter horses- but not ones which were altered by BA, right? Having a huge “D’oH!” moment now that I see what I did wrong and know there were some good usable mares in that lot. Lol But now I know!

I’ve bookmarked a bunch of forum posts to go back and read later, try and minimize my mistakes by learning from all the H&J veterans. :)

As Cheers says, it does take 1GMT to unalter a horse, which can get expensive real quick!

However, studs can have 50 foals per season. So if he is below that number, you can still find mares to breed him to! You can create 4 year old mares to breed him to if you have the funds. I would BA these ones, or take from a HH that you know the breeding quality from. All Perfect foundation and Top Notch Producer HHs will paper yellow and should pass BA. All Exceptionally Perfect and Exceptional Producer HHs will paper Red. Rank specials fall into these categories, and they usually say in their description. Or you can use the horse search! Make sure the click the button under Status "For breeding" and make sure that under gender only "Mare" is ticked.

@VenomVixen is there one or two foals that you were especially bummed about being altered? I'd be quite happy to send you some hbs to cover the cost of a GMT or two.