I like the stallion idea would be nice for a few Aussie boys visited the states or British ones. I can’t afford shipping to them.
Agreed. There are several stallions I’d love to breed to, but it’s just not worth the shipping costs. I have a mare I keep in Australia just so I can get SOME new blood, lol. Or I rely on cheap claimers and auctions, haha.
We all have such different ideas as to what we want and why. I simply need somewhere to for my horses to go to regain energy and NE. sending them home for this is entirely uneconomic at $19,000 per round trip per horse. with 82 horses and just 2 rests per year that will cost me $1,558,000 in shipping alone. with tax at $410,000 minimum that makes a base total of $1,968,000 without entry and shipping fees. and this is just for Aqueduct and the other near courses. I’d like to race on more tracks in the states but that would push the price even higher. If I was a high earning stable perhaps I could manage it but I’m not - 2015 was my best ever year.
For small starting out stables it must be also a problem as they may not have realised how much where they locate has as an influence on their viability.If where you are located has lots of racing time (Australia, Woodbine NY tracks together) then shipping is not such an issue. you can keep most of your horses running and send out you best to other tracks if you find a race that suits them. Shipping to a track to race is fair enough. If i really wanted to race a horse in Gulfstream the shipping fee to get it there is one thing but having to ship it there and back and there again just to rest is something else. Much more realistic and economic to ship it there, rest it close by race some more, rest again and at the end of the Gulfstream season ship it to Woodbine race it rest it etc.
There are two quick ways round this and I suggest them clearly realising they are not at all practical! 
one would be to give each stable a once only chance to re locate, say after one full years racing (aqueduct here I come!!!) or have fewer tracks and have the ones that are left race for a minimum 10 months per year so your babies, no hopers and average runners have somewhere to go with a chance of breaking even.
And if members send their horses to a particular track and leave them there all year, just sending them to a FF farm for R&R every couple of months doeas it really matter? It’s a game to be enjoyed not an enemy to be overcome 
Yeah, I just don’t want to throw off the FF economy too much (one way or the other). It’s a pretty minor concern, though. 
You could just send your better horses? Then they’ll make the $75 per day fee back easily. Keep the more average ones closer to home.
Limiting the number of days a horse can stay sounds fair and would really help. I generally rest a horse for a month after six months of racing. So if i had a horse in Australia it would be nice to rest him for a maximum of thirty days at a boarding stable in Australia before having to send him home. This would save me at least 1 round trip ticket at 50k. I dont know about anyone else but it costs me 25k to ship a horse 1 way to Australia.
So, simply put, my suggestion would be each horse can rest at a FF farm to gain NE for 30 days, whether used all at once or not, before having to return them home. Then the question would be: Would they be required to stay home for a certain amount of time before shipping back out? This could be called a quarantine period or something.
I would rather not add in more requirements, to keep it simple. A 30-day maximum would be fine, but requiring a set number of days at your farm sounds a bit much. Shipping back home would be sufficient, really.
That is a good idea.
Perhaps it could be set up as follows (I’m going to use my stable as an example);- I currently have 146 horses in my stable so I would lease 14 stalls (1 stall for every 10 horses) at $1,000 each for the year (I would have until Jan 15th to lease them). I would then specify where I wanted to lease the stalls, e.g. 2 in Australia, 1 in England, 1 at Gulfstream, 4 at Woodbine and 6 at Aqueduct. I would be able to send any horses I wanted to these stalls at various times during the year as long as I didn’t send more horses to any location than I had stalls. I would have to pay to ship my horses to the stalls at whatever the normal shipping cost is e.g. if I had a horse racing at Aqueduct and wanted to ship it to one of my “Aqueduct stalls” I would have to pay $100 which would be the cost of shipping a horse from Belmont to Aqueduct and which, I am guessing, is how much a stable who was located in New York somewhere would have to pay to ship a horse from their stable to (say) Aqueduct. Then, when I’ve decided the horse has had a long enough rest, I would ship it back to Aqueduct for another $100. If I wanted to ship a horse from another location (e.g. Woodbine) to one of my “Aqueduct stalls”, I would first have to ship it to Aqueduct then ship it to my stall. In addition, there could be a limit as to how long a horse could stay in one of these stalls at a time (say 4 weeks). At the beginning of the next year, I would then have to lease them all again, based on the number of horses in my stables and could then specify where I wanted them for that year.
Sounds too complicated. And Jason not all of us have the kind of horses able to run enough stakes in the us to afford the fees in another country. I’ve worked hard to build up my bloodlines that’s why I always need money, but I don’t have a single great horse. I used to a few yrs ago but he’s retired. There’s no way even tho I have a lot of horses I could pay huge fees even if I had a horse good enough to run somewhere else, I’d love to send a horse to Dubai if I had one! I have a pretty constant allow horse In aus but because I got him in a claimer, and unless he becomes stakes material I’ll probably put him in a claimer when I. Done trying to race him there rather than ship him to the USA.
I’m not really sure I get the argument that if you don’t have good horses you can’t afford to ship. You shouldn’t really be shipping then right? This game is about patience and luck. One will come along. I’ve got a bunch of racers, but the only ones that ever go abroad are ones I feel comfortable will win their money back and even then it doesn’t always happen.
Sub-farms or leasing stalls are not an option right now. Like I said - too complicated and/or too expensive (given that the goal is to reduce expenses for shipping).
True, but if you’ve chosen to base yourself where there isn’t year-round racing (England, for example), for whatever reason, then you really end up screwed if your tactic is just “I’ll wait to end up with an amazing horse who can beef up my bank account”.
Personally, I don’t pay attention to shipping costs, and I ship the hell out of my horses (so far this year I’ve been shipping home - from anywhere - after every race, though I don’t think that will continue). That’s only because I’ve been playing the game forever, and have more money than I know what to do with. 
That’s hardly a common problem, though.
That’s assuming you have some “better” ones. Last year, my better ones were OA level at best and with there only being racing in England 5 months of the year, if I don’t ship my horses out it basically means I wouldn’t play for over half the year. I didn’t realise when I joined about things like shipping fees (or that it be so addictive lol) so overseas boarding would really help (or year round racing, although I appreciate that’s not currently an option in the poll). I’ve been very fortunate that other stables have kindly given temporary homes to some of my runners otherwise I think I’d have given up ages ago. We only have one stable with studs in England so shipping fees for mares is high too, it’d be nice if maybe some of the FF studs could rotate to FF stables around the continents for a season or something.
Jason - with the greatest respect, you are suggesting this from a position of strength. You could race your whole string in australia for almost the whole year so your shipping costs could be negligible if you do that, it also gives you a good chance to see what horses are worth sending to other tracks too. from my viewpoint I only have from beginning of april to end of July to race at home and a total of 344 races during that time. not possible to find out enough about each horse in such a small window of opportunity and not enough races for them all. Keeping my average hoses (most of them) closer to home means no racing for most of the year. You are a very sucessful stable too, and can afford totake more risks. I have faced bankrupcy on more than one occasion and even though I have a decent starting point this year I have to budget very carefully. (adds an extra dimension to the game though so not knocking it too much)
But I’m not just talking about me here. there are a lot of small or new stables where similar constraints apply. Based at Gulfstream or Santa Anita will lead to similar problems, short racing season, high shipping fees. had i realised just how difficult it makes things to be located in England,I’d have located in the US but it was too late once I had found out.
lets keep it simple - have 3 or 4 FF resting stables throughout the States, maximum of 30 - 35 days boarding per horse per year, $100 per day ($3000 per year sounds fair to me) 50% NE gain to encourage sending home from time to time. Simple! 
LOVE the idea of randomly sited FF stallions again gives smaller more distant stables a bit of help. There are more of us than the really sucessful ones
I was thinking of having 1 stable per racetrack (so that you wouldn’t have to ship to a FF stable, which kind of defeats the point of having them). Possibly 30 day max per location (so you could rest 30 days at Aqueduct and 30 days at England each year). I do like a reduced NE gain (50-75%).
It would also make the races more competitive. For example, I have claimed a stallion in Australia and it’s so much easier for him to run well in lower class races, as he has almost no competition most of the time. If he was here near Belmont, he would have to deal with much more crowded races.
Adding European races is a great idea! For example, the famous steeplechase, Velk