Boarding stables would be fantastically helpful for a lot of members, I think. 
Should clink on the link right? 
Ok so I read through the boarding thread. Will there be something to discourage people from boarding? I mean if you’re only charging $25 a day for a racer, that’s only $9,125 per year. I might as well leave my horses in the US (if I didn’t want to contest any other races with that particular horse) because shipping just one way to the US from Aus is over 2.5 times the annual boarding fee. I assume fees aren’t quite worked out yet though
I think thats the point. So we dont have to ship back and forth. If you want to run in races on different continents then you would still pay the large shipping fee. So yeah its not suppose to be discouraged but helpful…
This fee structure would encourage me to have two racing strings - a US one and an Aussie one - I can’t do this now because shipping would nail my budget and it’s a pain having to set up boarding. I could double my racer stock due to cheap boarding. I’m just saying I think there needs to be a reason to go home.
That’s a fair point. The most obvious thing that springs to mind is natural energy.
So say you board at a FF farm to rest your horse - he could gain physical energy back, but not natural energy (since he’s still in a strange barn, away from home).
Then the only way to regain NE would be to send him back to his familiar place (i.e. your farm).
Horses can run with low NE, so it wouldn’t force you to ship home if you didn’t want to, but low NE decreases performance, so you’d probably want to. The key point would be that you wouldn’t have to do it every race, so you’d still save some money. You could send your horse out for a string of races over the course of a few weeks, using FF farms to keep their energy up, and then bring them back home for a few weeks to regain their mental “spark”.
I don’t want to make boarding fees ridiculously expensive because then it defeats the point. (Though I may raise the stud fee to $100/day so that you really do have to choose if it’s worth standing your stud elsewhere for the year.)
But they regain energy anywhere. I dont understand a stable to just regain physical energy. A way to limit the boarding issue Jason pointed out may be to enforce a stable limit?
They don’t, though. If you go to a show, your horse isn’t necessarily the same as when he’s at home with his normal routine/pastures/etc. So there is an argument that mental/natural energy would only be recoverable at your own farm.
True. Though, I just don’t see the point of a boarding stable then. Unless the horses regain energy much faster boarding than at the track, but I thought that was all dependant on the tiredness factor?
My issue with boarding stables not regaining NE is members will still have to ask for favors of other stables. I thought with the boarding we were trying to cut down on shipping costs, relying on others help, and shipping durations. Maybe a horse should be required to ship home a least once a year? Or maybe boarding stables only regain 1/2 NE so that a 2 week rest would be like a 1 week rest?
I feel there should be some sort of other gain besides physical energy at a boarding stable if paying for board because a horse can also regain physical energy at the track.
What about purchasing ‘sub-farms’? These could start as little as say five stall farms to 50 stall farms for larger stables?
Thats a neat idea. I think a very limited number like 5-10 (even less?)stalls would be best, though, to discourage the whole double/triple/quad racing string thing.
Then the questions are:
How much?
Extra taxes?
How would this benefit smaller/newer stables?
Also, this sounds like it could potentially be a lot of extra coding for Shanthi. Maybe real money could be a factor in sub stables as well.
I really don’t want to get into dealing with multiple stable locations. Plus, if this were added, it would have to be really expensive (to reflect the fact that land/building horse facilities costs a lot of money), so still wouldn’t help out with members who’re struggling financially (and unable to ship their horses home).
Yeah, that’s a fair point. Requiring a shipment home every X months/years sounds decent, but would be a pain to code. Having boarding stables less efficient than your home farm could be an option, too - perhaps as a factor of how far away the farm is. So if you board at a FF stable that’s 50 miles from your own farm, it’s practically useless (NE-wise) because the horse would rather just be home. But if you’re halfway around the world, it’s more valuable because the horse isn’t seeing familiar territory and wanting to be home. (Though that still wouldn’t address Jason’s point about a year’s boarding somewhere being less than one-way shipping.)
The main point to adding boarding stables is to give people the option to rest a horse locally rather than ship them all the way home to rest. Another option would be to limit the amount of time your horse can stay, so you can’t just “park” your horse for 6 months.
Or maybe our existing stables could serve as boarding stables? This could cost at the beginning (it would be something like purchasing more land for your stable, so that you can use it for other people’s horses, but not for your own). If someone wanted to, they could pay some amount of money to cover the expenses of “building a boarding stable” for other players, and then charge a fee. And maybe these stables could be limited in size, but players could expand them if they wanted to, but there could be a tax on boarding stable - so a smaller one would cost less, but it would also make less money for the player.
That would be even more complicated than just doing FF-owned boarding stables. Plus I’d rather not have to deal with the politics of it. (“Why did you choose to board at Joe’s barn for 5 days instead of mine?” etc)
I think FF-owned is the best way to go.
Just need to work out rules, fees, etc. to make it effective.
Perhaps NE can be regained at a slower rate at boarding stables than at home? The entire point I ship my ponies home is to regain NE, so having boarding stables where they don’t regain NE is kind of pointless.
So the average shipping cost (air travel) is around 12.5k. If we double that for a round-trip, making 25k, and divide by 365 to get a daily rate, that’s around $70. Make it $75 for nicer numbers, and the cost to board a horse at a FF farm per year is 27k. (The cost for 25 days, which ought to be enough to regain energy for the slowest stat horse, would be < 2k.) That would make it less attractive to park your horses somewhere indefinitely, but still cheaper than shipping (unless you’re very close, in which case you may as well ship home).
I’m also happy to do a reduced (but not 0) NE gain at boarding stables. Say 50% or 75% of what you’d get at home. Then it’s still doing something, but isn’t as efficient as bringing your horses to your own farm to rest.
So for boarding fees, perhaps:
Racehorses: $75/day
Stallions: $100/day
Not sure if I’ll bother with broodmares, really, as you don’t have to ship them home if you don’t want to. And they obviously don’t need rest. I don’t know if anyone cares where their stallion is based, but it’s easy enough to give the option to board studs in case you want to base your boy somewhere else (i.e. not overseas if most of your outside mares would be on another continent).
Sounds good
I think $75 is too much, even though the maths makes sense.