Is this true for you? What suggestions do you have for making large stable management easier?
Future plans for FF include more races, which should make finding races for a large string of horses easier, and FF stables, which will make shipping less of an issue. What other ideas do you have to allow for “easy” management of a large stable?
Well, that’s kinda true for me, too. Though I’m not a large stable, all the money I have to spend makes it very hard for me to earn anything, especially since I’m still learning how to win races and I’ve only got one racer right now. Just thought I’d mention this.
I don’t know but I think the game is good where it sits right now. There are a few tweaks that could be made. But it looks like they are coming(Rest stop farms etc.). On the whole I think it should be difficult to manage 30+ racing horses unlike real life where you may have an assistant trainer to oversee things.
I probably shouldn’t be one to talk, since I’ve been unreliably in and out these past three months.
Well i have to say i really like the changes that have been made.Yes it’s more challenging but man do i feel good when my horses do win or even place.The biggest problems i have are having to ship horses home from across seas as i don’t have a barn there. we REALLY need a boarding stable. hum one opetion(don’t know who fesiable it is) is to be able to take in ouside boarders. That would also be another source of income(and we really need to have more income coming in for the stables that have limited income or just plane mid range horses)for the boarding stable and a place for our across seas runners.
Yes financial stuff has made the game harder to play, just makes for more of a challenge though! The real world there are jockey fees, training fees, loans, etc.
I dont see how adding loans would make much difference to bigger stables. It’s something that you can choose to take no part in or be involved in. It’s by no means a requirement so it shouldn’t have any effect on how the bigger stables run.
Training has been the biggest challenge for me as well. With my scheduale it is hard to find time for each horse everyday. Even every other day is a challenge. I dont like using pre-made training for my horses simply because a horse will train everyday differently. When I train I ‘custom’ train, I find it much more effective. This becomes much much much more difficult in a large stable. That said I still think it’s a great addition to the game, it just makes it tougher on large stables.
"Training has been the biggest challenge for me as well. With my scheduale it is hard to find time for each horse everyday. "
In nother post i added the thought of “hiring” trainers. It would help lighten the training schedule of a large stable and it would give the smaller stables not only anotther source of income it would give tehm more horses to play with.and if they can take out a loan to pay training fees there would be no problem gettign started.
Uhm well, I’m not a large stable, but recently for me, money has been my main issue. But I’m over it now that my head’s set straight and I know what I want to happen for my stable this year (which is, if anyone cares to know, coming out of taxes not in debt lol!)
My suggestions for how to make it easier for a bigger stable would be to make some more alerts (=x). Like how there are Upcoming Races listed on Horse A’s page, would it be possible for the database to go “Oh! This race is coming up this raceday for this horse at -location-!” / “This race is coming up for this raceday for this horse at -location-. Would you like to enter s/he? [YES button to enter here] [NO button to maybe cancel the alert? Don’t know if this is possible?]” and YES takes the owner to the usual entry page.
So there are two helpful ones, although the 2nd would be more efficient for an owner.
Uhm… that’s all I can think of lol.
I have to agree with everyone else who’s saying the changes are good! I was a little peeved at first, but I’m not one for change and learning new things. It took time to adapt (and some yelling from Edea) but I really like the system. It makes me more aware of what I’m doing, and not madwoman entering all around the world lol. 
The problem with that idea is that for those stables who have more than, say, 10 racehorses, you’d get a bajillion alerts. (Especially if it didn’t know exactly what sort of race you were looking for, and thus suggested every single upcoming race available.)
However, I am planning on adding buttons to the upcoming races list on the horse’s page so that you can enter the horse from that page. 
by: CricketHill
I have to agree with Cricket. It has become a Task rather than a pleasure. There’s a lot about this game I loved when I started, and it led me to work at it. Unlike Cricket I almost never spent only 30 minutes a week at it. At the end of this month I’ll have 3 years in game so I’m not an old timer. However in that time I went from 1 horse to 160 horses, 45 racers. So in a relatively short span of time I’ve run small and big, and I’ve run big on both side of the change.
It’s a not a matter of an assistant trainer in real life they assistant [color=red]trainers, and the push is supposedly to make this as much like real life as possible 
So if that’s the case it should be easier to manage a large stable than what it is. You can have it one way or the other, we can’t have it both ways. I play a lot of Sim games and I can rely on the numbers however they’re generated or what they pertain to to make sense and give me somethings to base my judgments on. I don’t have that confidence here right now, and in all reality that is real life in the sport, But I didn’t come here to play at real life, I live that. I came here to play a game. I think adding races and FF stables will help, but I don’t think it’s a cure at least for me.
I want to make it perfectly clear that I think Shanthi has done a great job here. In fact amazing.
What makes it task-like rather than pleasurable?
I guess I don’t really understand all the angst over training, because I just have my horses set on a very light schedule (walk/trot 4-5 days a week), and that’s it. I use training purely so that my horses will get to know the jockeys (and then I can use the jockeys to learn what the horses are like), not as a fitness tool.
Lol, this is true! I only have about 7 racing right now (the rest are at home/leased) so it didn’t dawn on me!
I like your buttons idea haha. A lot more convenient/easier than mine. I guess for me it’s just that I don’t GO to my horses’ upcoming races pages, so that’s why my suggestion was alerts lol 
Alternately, I can setup a page that lists all your racers and all the races they qualify for (from the upcoming races page, but limited to races with open entries) so that you can still view them all in one place. I’ll figure that out when I actually create the page. 
I REALLY like the sound of that one.
RLOF…i jsut realized i’m running a string of 30 racers and that dosen’t count the 6 i have leased…
Training isn’t too much of a chore for me, as I barely ever use it. I find that any activity done more than once or twice a week results in a horse who never has enough energy to race. I think we discussed at one point how walking a mile every day could result in negative energy after a month or so. So, I basically go through and train any horses with A energy C-F fitness after I’ve done my entries for the week. Of course, if I don’t train, I don’t get any equipment/running style feedback, so if I want to fiddle with equipment I’m sort of forced to train.
The problem I have with trying to manage a large stable is juggling shipping horses home to regain NE, get to the track in time, etc. Being able to enter races more than 7 days in advance would help, as then you could say “I like this race that’s coming up in 2 weeks time, I’ll enter my horse (and have it autoship) and then once it gets there it’ll have time to rest, recover it’s energy, and maybe get a light workout in to get the horse a chance to gain some fitness”. Of course, that makes the effort involved in finding a race that much higher.
Being able to enter directly off the “upcoming races” link would be useful, but again, with more than about 30 horses you’d be looking at a lot of filtering/fiddling.
So to summarize everything I can think of that each horse requires: Jockey optimizing, equipment optimizing, track (physical location) optimizing, track (surface) optimizing, Running style optimizing, surface condition to worry about, NE to worry about, fitness to worry about, competition to worry about, nominations to worry about, etc etc.
Suggestions: With 5 options there are what, 120? possible equipment options… there’s no really good way to try to figure out what equipment the horse needs. Jockeys could possibly suggest “this horse gets distracted easily” so you’d know it needs blinkers/shadow roll possibly, or you could just ditch the “optimal” equipment setup in the code that penalizes you for wrong equipment, and have equipment give realistic bonuses so if I put W on my horse, he’s less likely to go lame, if I put Blinkers on he’s got more courage but less likely to notice horses coming up behind him, NW helps horses with high courage/heart, but hurts those without it, etc). Feedback on a horse’s turning ability… it has an effect on horse racing, but there’s no way to know how well a horse turns at the moment unless you run 10 or so races on each track and see where he tends to perform better. Surface preference as far as dirt/turf… at the moment there’s not a good way to manage this.
Jockeys give comments after workouts, but only about random things. It’d help if I could ask the jockey before the workout for feedback (ie have him tell me how well he knows the horse, how he likes the horse, equipment suggestions, surface suggestions, running style suggestions, etc). Even with that it’d be almost impossible to keep track of that many variables for each horse, but at least then I’d have the info available to look at. Maybe you could set up the “upcoming races” thing to let us assign important parameters, so it’d show all races the horse qualifies for, weighted by qualifications you set… For example, if I have a 3yo F who likes dirt and I’m trying to keep in the Northeast I could tell the game that the #1 criteria is that the race is F/M only, #2 is that it’s for 3yo, #3 that it’s on dirt, and #4 that it’s at Belmont or Saratoga and then it spits out the races I’m interested in for her with options to enter directly from there, even if the race is 4 weeks out. That way I can enter her and not forget that I’d found a perfect race for her by the time it shows up. Also, the workout listing could list the date of her upcoming race instead of just color coding it, so that I’d know “yes, she’s entered, but she needs more works before she can run”.
Dunno, it’s easy to come up with ideas, harder to code them.
I agree with this. Especially since we can’t see these horses to gauge how they’re performing and what might help them. So the jockeys are the best tool we can use to make decisions on what we should tweak to optimize our horses performance. But when it’s so confusing and inaccurate I tend to just disregard it and not use it because it just becomes another useless feature in my mind.
I also think with the rising costs of the game a monthly or weekly salary could be put into use. Not a ton of money but just enough to help keep the stables afloat when all their horses decide to run backwards for that week. lol
It would be cool and helpful to have an option to tell the jock, ‘Okay, I want feedback on x, y, or z’, so they can tell you more pinpointed information. I’m trying to think of what those options would be. I know I definitely want to hear more about equipment and ratability/running style…perhaps have a little drop-down menu by each horse’s name on the workout page where you can select one of those options, or just choose ‘Anything’ to have the jockey tell you whatever they feel like telling you about. And perhaps also - say every 5 or 10 workouts - have the jockey tell you something about NE in a ‘bonus’ bit of feedback, so you can always know you’re keeping abreast of it. Overall, I don’t feel that I have much trouble with training, but it would be nice to get more specific feedback at times rather than waiting to see what random wisdom the jockey feels like giving today.
I don’t feel that I have very much trouble finding races. At the end of each month, I search the race schedule for races in the New York area, and print them out…then I sit and stare at the training summary page as I go through the printout and assign horses to races, basically planning my schedule out a month in advance. It still takes like half an hour to do that, but I don’t mind. If I absolutely can’t find a race a horse is suited for, I send it home for a vacation (I admit I’m pretty paranoid about NE ). Then all I have to do throughout the month is double-check the summary page to make sure they’re not at F energy when I’m entering them. Of course, every now and then a horse decides it wants a vacation, which throws a wrench into things, but what is life without surprises? Granted, I do focus on staying ‘local’ - almost exclusively at New York tracks - so I’m sure that it would still be more work-intensive for a more international stable.
As far as money, yes, I’m stressed about it a little, but at the same time - I was able to drop almost half a mil on breedings, and I’ve bought lots of horses this year…so me not having too much money is mostly my fault. I don’t feel that I need a weekly/monthly allowance to help bail me out…though it would be nice if our money could gain interest. Then again, if I’ve got $100,000 and every month I’m getting $1,000 in interest, is that really going to help me out much? I’m probably better doing handicapping.
Ultimately, I don’t think I have too much trouble running things. There are times when I look at my training page and say “Who is this horse again? What does he do?” and have to spend half an hour figuring out what on earth they’re remotely good at. But I think that would have happened under the old code, too.
Actually, it’s only 31. 
(Edit: 32, really, counting “no equipment” as an option.)
It does that already, that was part of the revamp. For every piece of equipment the horse wears, it has: 1) a positive effect (if the horse wants it), 2) a negative effect (if the horse doesn’t want it and it hurts their racing, such as blinkers preventing a horse from seeing someone coming up from behind), or 3) minimal/neutral effect (such as putting wraps on your horse, unless the ground is muddy in which case the horse is slower/has a greater chance of injury thanks to tight/wet wraps - provided it doesn’t want wraps, obviously)
Racetracks don’t vary that much on turns, so I treat this as a stat that you don’t really need to care much about…horses that turn badly will tend to lose a little ground around the turns, but if everyone’s losing ground, it’s not a huge difference if one horse loses 6" of ground vs. another one losing 8", since the finish line is still at least 2 furlongs away (with the way races/tracks are setup).
There is in comparing workout times, and in comparing race performance on a certain track.
That’s doable.
Already on the to-do list.
I haven’t yet decided if I want to allow for actual race entering early, or just setup a stored race schedule (so then it would alert you that Filly A has Race #12 on October 15 on her schedule, and entries for that are now open.
Also doable.
I haven’t really thought of the idea of having a “savings” account, but it’s feasible, I suppose. 1% interest/month is more like a credit card interest rate than a savings interest rate though I suppose we could pretend that FF money is in a money market, which makes more like 10%/year.