When I started playing this game back in week 2450 something, I soon found the breeding pages. I had played horse racing sims before (but nothing ever came close to what this one has on offer) and was used to trying breeding combinations that might work well. One of the first things this game taught me is that these are known as ‘nicks’. Another thing I soon learned is that it can cost a heck of a lot of credits or BPs to breed to the better horses. Fortunately, the BTB gave me the opportunity to earn a few credits – I was out of work at the time and couldn’t afford to buy any.

Anyway, I digress. Let’s get on to the reason I wrote this article. I run 50 stables now under the Willow and Whisper yards and not a week goes by that I don’t breed at least one horse. I DO work now and can afford to support the game with credit purchases but that doesn’t mean that I throw them away frivolously. Yes, I’ve done a few of the button clickfest $25 ‘super’ breeds but most have turned out to be barely better than average. I then came across a wonderful tool written by Denovo called Sim Dosage and that started me off on the right path. All I had to do was download the weekly breeding file, unzip it and I could enter the horse number of my latest experiments and find out how far/fast they should be able to run. Of course, like real life breeding, it isn’t foolproof and sometimes you get a horse that shouldn’t be able to go more than 5 furlongs being able to run 2 miles but if everything was strictly ‘by the book’, it would be a pretty boring game. There are many tools and webpages similar to the Sim Dosage one – type Chefs de Race into a search engine and you will find the ‘real life’ dosage statistics – but I have stuck with the first one because it works.

“Get to the point…” I hear you cry.

OK. One of the easiest ways to find a nice ‘cheap end’ sire is to go to the Breeding link and click on Sire Stats. You can also click on the links above the stats to sort them how you want. I like to use the $/Rnr link:

Try it – and you will find that for 2006, the top dollars per runner Sire was Mass Media who is available for 56 points on a typical Sunday morning! And if Mass Media has gone, why not try the second horse in the list – Law Society – for a princely 67 points. Don’t be afraid to change the Sim Birth Year. 2005 wasn’t a great year for the cheaper sires in the dollar per runner stats (although Military ranked 14 is available for 88 points).

Try some of the other stats too – going back to 2006 and clicking on %SWnr (percentage Stakes winners) shows Seneca Jones in second place. He produced only 5 horses that year but they have all won a race and one even went on to take a Stakes race. How much to breed with this remarkable animal? 18 points!

And don’t stop at the Sires, search for Dam Sire stats for 2006 and using the %SWnr again, we get Run the Gantlet (127 points) heading the list with 5 from 6 progeny managing to win at least one race and 2 of those winning Stakes races. In the dollar per runner department, Take Risks (38 points) comes in at number 4.

OK, it’s not as easy as that – as stated earlier, you need to use things like dosage profilers and the like to match these cheap sires up; if you simply breed the cheap ones, you will probably end up with a set of donkeys. The secret is to use one of the cheaper ones to compliment some half-decent lines. Remember that you are often just looking to make back what you paid for a horse in BPs and anything above that is often a bonus.

Good Luck and see you at the races.