Up to now, breeding has been able to be done at any time (during the breeding season, of course). However, this is rather unrealistic as it allows breeders to retroactively breed mares in August for a February breeding.
What I’d like to do is have it setup so that you must book the breeding by the time that slot ends (2/21, 2/28, 3/10, 3/20, 3/31, 4/15, 4/30, 5/15, 5/31, 6/15, 6/30, 7/15, 7/31, 8/15, and 8/31 respectively). If you don’t have the mare booked/approved by then, you don’t get to use that date and must choose a later date. Once the mare is booked, you can select the Breed The Foal button at any time (until the breeding season ends).
However, this could cause issues if people are out of town or have computer issues…for the most part, so I don’t want to just mandate that this is How It Shall Be. (On the other hand, in real life if you get caught up with stuff and don’t breed your mare, she doesn’t get bred so it would be true to life as well.)
Also note that I would likely set things up so that you could start booking horses in January, even though you still wouldn’t be able to breed them until Feb 15 rolls around. This wouldn’t really help very many mares unless they foal early on in the year, but stud owners could reserve bookings in advance and thus ensure that mares get booked to their studs.
Sounds ok, but it seems like you might want to give another spot leeway for stud owners to approve the breedings? It’d suck for your mare to get penalized for someone else’s slackness. So you’d have to have Feb 2 mare breedings in by Mar 1st, and stud owners would have until end of Mar 1 spot to approve the Feb 2 spot.
I think that sounds reasonable, and more importantly, more realistic. I agree with Andrea that there should be some sort of leeway for people, so that people aren’t punished just because some studs don’t have very active members. I think the leeway should be a month (for Feb 1 breedings you have until March 1), but that’s just me.
It sounds very realistic to me…lol, though now i ahve to go make sure all my stallions owners have approved my bookingss…In real life if a stallion owner doesent respond to a breeding request most likely you’d go looking for anoter stud owner who does…
Now will the breeding button be open on the mares that have 2/1 or 2/2 bookings?? i though i saw somewhere that the breeding season began Feb 15th( i could be wrong).If so are we going to be missing those first 2 weeks of bookings???
Thanks
And mares won’t be penalized if the breeding code isn’t done before the middle of Feb. Personally I’d rather see the race code before the breeding code.
so it would be true to life as well.)