I have these two fillies:
[color=red]Daralhorra - 16.1h (expected height 17.0h - 18.0h), born April 29. Her dam died during foaling, so she’s her only foal.
and [color=red]Doridacea - 15.2h (expected height 16.2h - 17.2h), born April 4. She’s her dam’s oldest foal.
I keep them untrained at the barn because they still seem to have a lot to grow, but since they’re born in April, they are not so young anymore. Would you start training/racing them, or is it better to wait until next year?
Since not all horses hit their estimated heights I prefer to guesstimate based on performance (though I don’t bother running them if they’re under 14.1h)
If they were mine I’d have them at the track doing workouts to get them used to a jockey as quickly as possible and probably give them both a start. If they do well I’d keep racing, if not only try every couple of months or so.
finalfurlong.org/viewhorse.php?horse=17480 <----- He is 4yr old and still 3inches short of his minimum est height
I’ve also had several 2yo’s winning early in the year that grew some more later in the year, meaning they were still competitive despite being immature. It depends on the horse but better to know than possibly waste their potential
I go by birthdate and performance. I try not to race my 2yos before they’re really 2 (i.e. the month of birth in their 2yo year) because there’s no way they can be mature then. Beyond that, though, I try everyone out and the ones who seem to know what a racetrack is and how it works get to keep running, the others get sent back to the farm until I feel like trying them out again.
Immaturity does take a hit to a horse’s stats, but it’s not going to cut them in half or anything - if your horse is stakes quality it should be at least allowance-level while immature (assuming, of course, that it likes the sorts of races available to 2yos). Likewise if your horse has the worst stats in the game it’s not like being immature is going to do much more damage. 
Also, as a side note, maturity is not handled in a binary fashion - e.g. boom, you’re mature! boom, you’re a hasbeen!). The code calculates a bell curve for the horse, with the peak at the horse’s maturity date. So if a horse is going to peak when he’s 3 years and 3 months old, he’ll be 33% mature at 2 years and 5 months old (2 years, or 24 months, being the start of the bell curve, 3 yrs 3months, or 39 months, being the top of the bell curve - 5 months in is 33%). Likewise when he’s 3 years and 8 months old he’ll be 66% “mature” again as he’s on the downhill side of the bell curve.
(Hope that makes sense, I feel like I need graphs and a laser pointer or something.)
You probably do need a graph for me 
as you’ve said before some horses can be at peak for 1 year, some for 3 years? i think. So ones with a shorter span simply have a steeper curve?
Yes, exactly. Horses have 2 dates assigned to them - start of maturity, end of maturity.
So, for easy math, let’s take Horse A and Horse B, both born on January 1, 2016.
Horse A’s start of maturity is June 1, 2018 (age 2 1/2), end of maturity is January 1, 2020 (age 4), giving him an 18-month peak.
His bell curve would go from January 1, 2018 (start of age 2) to June 1, 2020 (length of peak + the 6 months pre-peak he had at age 2), so his curve is 2 1/2 years long, and 1 1/2 years of that is peak. It does a bit of extra stuff to make the peak part extra-peak-y (so the start/end 6 months are more flat than the middle when he’s actually peaking), but that’s roughly how it would work.
Depending on when you run him during that time his stats get affected differently (I made up numbers to represent the out-of-peak bit, don’t treat this as gospel):
1/1/18-3/1/18 - can’t race yet
4/1/18 - 6%
5/1/18 - 8%
6/1/18 - 10% - start the peak
7/1/18 - 19%
8/1/18 - 28%
9/1/18 - 37%
10/1/18 - 46%
11/1/18 - 55%
12/1/18 - 64%
1/1/19 - 73%
2/1/19 - 82%
3/1/19 - 91%
4/1/19 - 100% - peak
5/1/19 - 91%
6/1/19 - 82%
7/1/19 - 73%
8/1/19 - 64%
9/1/19 - 55%
10/1/19 - 46%
11/1/19 - 37%
12/1/19 - 28%
1/1/20 - 19%
2/1/20 - 10% - end the peak
3/1/20 - 8%
4/1/20 - 6%
5/1/20 - 4%
6/1/20 - 2%
7/1/20 - 0%
8/1/20… stats continue to decline slowly as he’s getting more and more of a has-been
Hopefully that shows that yes, he matured as a 3yo, but it’s not like he suddenly became super amazing - he could’ve raced quite well as a late 2yo, and on into his 4yo year.
For contrast
Horse B’s start of maturity is January 1, 2019 (age 3), end of maturity is June 1, 2021 (age 5 1/2), giving him a 30-month peak.
His bell curve would go from January 1, 2018 (start of age 2) to June 1, 2022 (length of peak + the 12 months pre-peak he had at age 2), so his curve is 4 1/2 years long, and 2 1/2 years of that is peak.
His numbers would be:
1/1/18-3/1/18 - can’t race yet
4/1/18 - 3%
5/1/18 - 3.8%
6/1/18 - 4.6%
7/1/18 - 5.4%
8/1/18 - 6.2%
9/1/18 - 7.0%
10/1/18 - 7.8%
11/1/18 - 8.6%
12/1/18 - 9.4%
1/1/19 - 10% - start the peak
2/1/19 - 16%
3/1/19 - 22%
4/1/19 - 28%
5/1/19 - 34%
6/1/19 - 40%
7/1/19 - 46%
8/1/19 - 52%
9/1/19 - 58%
10/1/19 - 64%
11/1/19 - 70%
12/1/19 - 76%
1/1/20 - 82%
2/1/20 - 88%
3/1/20 - 94%
4/1/20 - 100% - peak
5/1/20 - 94%
6/1/20 - 88%
7/1/20 - 82%
8/1/20 - 76%
9/1/20 - 70%
10/1/20 - 64%
11/1/20 - 58%
12/1/20 - 52%
1/1/21 - 46%
2/1/21 - 40%
3/1/21 - 34%
4/1/21 - 28%
5/1/21 - 22%
6/1/21 - 16%
7/1/21 - 10% - end the peak
8/1/21 - 9.4%
9/1/21 - 8.6%
10/1/21 - 7.8%
11/1/21 - 7.0%
12/1/21 - 6.2%
1/1/22 - 5.4%
2/1/22 - 4.6%
3/1/22 - 3.8%
4/1/22 - 3%
5/1/22 - 2.2%
6/1/22 - 1.4%
7/1/22 - 0.6%
8/1/22 - 0%
9/1/22… stats continue to decline slowly as he’s getting more and more of a has-been
You can see that Horse B’s curve is a lot longer but flatter. Over the course of 3 months you’d probably go “wow” a bit more with Horse A’s change in level, but Horse B’s curve lasts another 2 years.
Final note:
Bear in mind that these percentages are based on a small percentage of the stat itself. If the stat goes from 1-100, the amount affected by maturity is probably only 10-20, so running him at 18% maturity/has-been-ness doesn’t mean he’s got an 18 for the stat, he keeps at least 80 of it innately and the other 1.8-3.6 is what’s added by being at 18% maturity.
Hope that helps a bit. 
Thanks a lot everyone! I shipped both fillies to the track for some training
oooh wow yes that does help, it’s very interesting! Love knowing more about the workings of the ponies. I may have to read it a few times, didn’t pay too much attention in school lol
And so what you’re also saying is that into has-been-ness the actual stat itself decays until they’ve basically got nothing left of their innate talent?
oh AND do the height changes coincide with any of the peak starts or the actual peak or just somewhere in there at random?
(sorry I hijacked your post Hilda! )
If anything looks weird feel free to chalk it up to math errors on my part. 
I’m pretty sure there’s a limit on how much has-been-ness eats into a horse’s stats - off the top of my head I want to say it’s 20% of their innate ability. So if the stat was 80 and they’re 3 years past their prime the stat would be 64.
It should line up to the start of peak (6/1/18 for Horse A, 1/1/19 for horse B). They don’t actually peak in ability until later though (4/1/19 and 4/1/20) because of the bell curve. So the horse height should follow a similar line to the up side of the maturity bell curve, except it’s a lot longer (since foals are born at 50-60% of their full height and won’t be mature until at least 2 years old).
Also, I suppose that ponies can inherit the length and time of their maturity?
Fascinating, thanks for answering all my questions even if you made errors I’d never know, I hate math and I have no idea how you had the patience to put all this together! BUT… 
can we take that to mean that FFCh. Loveofthegame will be running until he basically drops dead?
Yes, to an extent. Random numbers get applied a fair bit for that, though.
Fun fact, I just looked him up and he’s not yet a has-been. 
(He’s definitely on the downhill side of his bell curve, though!)
You can see from his race record that he was a very late bloomer. The game only lets horses race until age 10, though, so he won’t keep winning forever, if only because of that.
Haha wow that’s still a year to go! Shame he’s not a stallion, I would pay a lot for my babies to possibly inherit a bell curve like that LOL 
Yeah, it’s definitely an argument for not giving up on your colts (though he’s definitely the exception rather than the rule - both for his late blooming and the length of his peak).
I don’t suppose that it’s is something we can “look up” ourselves? At the very least, it will stop us from persisting with some of our horses which have “bottomed out” their bell curves.
A question related to this:- You have a horse that you have had at the Farm for 3 weeks rest, ship it to a track and race it. You then give it 3 weeks break during which it is being trained (not over-trained) then look at its Energy/Fitness figures. More often than not, they will be at A/A (or maybe B/A). However, occasionally, you’ll get a horse that is at F/A and may take another few weeks to rebuild its Energy.
Could that be an indication that it is nearing the bottom of its curve?
No, I looked directly in the databse. I do plan to add this to the beta eventually, though (not the exact dates, but a sense of where they are).
No. If a horse recovers 7 points of energy a day it will recover that for the rest of its life, likewise if it recovers 20 points of energy a day. (That said, an immature/has-been horse is likely to work harder in races so may take longer to get back to 100% energy than when they’re at their peak.)
I think I’ve brought something like this up before…I always thought it would be super fun if after a horse was retired from racing or breeding we would have access to their “data”. It would be super interesting and fun to compare and see some of the best and worse and analyze the content against each other!
I might consider this for retired geldings who’ve never bred, but it would be pretty low on the priority list.