Well, I just got in here, and I’m just a bit lost, I’ll admit. I managed to set my stable down outside of Churchill Downs, and then realized there were no races there, so I managed to ship my two horses to Arlington. They’ll be there Saturday; what then? What sort of training schedule works best? How do you determine what your horse likes? In the other game I’m in, it gives it to us (so we know pretty quickly if the horse likes to run sprints on turf, or whatever), but I’m not sure how the training process goes here.
Any help?
Well I personally wouldn’t worry too much about training. Other players may feel differently but I only train when one of my horses has low fitness/high energy and there aren’t any races to enter them in for awhile (so basically rarely). If your horses have already raced I would say look at their records and try and see what distances/surfaces they liked and did well on. Otherwise I would just start them off at the lowest race they qualify for and just see how it goes. Hopefully you got two decent starter horses as some horses just don’t wanna run and will never be that good.
Kate! From HF, right? Welcome to FF!
I’m with Fleet Feet on training - I haven’t really been using it much, except when there aren’t any races nearby that the horse is eligible for. And you have to sort of figure out your horse like a real one - if you buy one bred in the game, you can look at the parents’ race records & those of half-siblings & such to get an idea of what it might like. But with one from created lines, you just have to use trial and error, through race results usually (although I’m sure you can figure out through training eventually…you just have to be patient enough to wait until the jockey knows your horse REALLY well before you can believe what they say fully).
If you have any questions, feel free to IM me or something. I’d be glad to help! I hope you enjoy it here. 
Jockeys learn a LOT about a horse from racing it as opposed to only a little from workouts (except ones where the jockey falls off or the horse bolts, but it’s hard to hope for workouts like that). I’d suggest trying to race your horse 2 or 3 times in the lowest level races it qualifies for before attempting to use training to figure your horse out.
Once you get a comment like “I’m starting to know ____ better” or something similar you can start to trust what they say about running style and equipment preferences and fitness. I think how well the jockey and horse know each other/get along is the only error proof comment. I typically run horses with the “Jockey preference” option for race positioning until I see that the horse wins or does best with one or the other. Even a totally new jockey will have some idea where to place your horse, which is more than I do with a totally unraced horse.
Once a jockey knows the horse if I’m having not-so-great luck earning paychecks with the horse then I’ll use training (a series of breezes typically, though sometimes just jogs if all I want is as much feedback as I can get as quickly as possible) to fiddle with equipment/surfaces. I like breezes for that as the game tracks breeze times so you can go back a week or two later and see that your horse breezed 2 seconds faster without a whip than with one, or whatever. Times for workouts can be really odd sometimes though, so even that doesn’t always work.
Good luck figuring everything out! Even us “old” members are still workout out how to best take advantage of training. My biggest suggestion: Try to ship your horse home every other race or so to recover his energy instead of leaving him at the track. Other than cost there’s no drawback and it’ll let him or her recover natural energy (mental energy if you will) at the same time as physical energy.
Man, I didn’t know that horses didn’t lose energy when you ship them home…so only when you ship them away from home or from track to track??
No, horses lose energy whenever they step on a trailer/airplane. I think Andrea meant there’s no drawback to having the horse at the farm rather than at the track to regain energy.
Ahh, yeah, sorry for the confusion. Your horse will loose more energy by shipping him home, but I’ve started trying to keep my horses no more than two or three days by road from my farm, so I figure the NE boost from shipping home outweighs the extra 2-3 days of recovery time.
Hey Alyssa! Yep, it’s me, I’ve been busy expanding Starlight!
OK…I’m still confused. I have two created horses. I tried entering them in several allowances (since there weren’t any maidens coming up) and it kept telling me I didn’t have any eligible horses. Since I know my horses would arrive on the track several days before the races, and since (as far as I could tell) they fit the qualifications, I don’t know why there’s that problem…