The horses

The horse is the central object of the game: everything you do turns around it. This page explains what it is — what it is made of, how it ages, what makes it progress, and the few figures that sum up its value.

It describes no screen. For its card, see A horse's card; for heredity, breeding; for what happens in a race, The races.

Its identity

The name is free, and it has to be unique within your breeding operation. Two different breeders can therefore each have their own Winner: it is the breeding suffix that tells them apart, and it is set in My account. Bear that in mind when you look for a horse by name — it is the code that is unambiguous, not the name.

The speciality — flat, hurdle or trot — is fixed at birth and never changes. There are no breeds in Sulkyland: the speciality takes that part. You only cross horses of the same one, and you only race in your own.

Its age, and the end of its career

The game's time runs faster than yours: one real month is worth one horse year.

A point of vocabulary before the figures, because it clears up an apparent oddity. The game speaks of birth, and yet the horse that arrives is already one year old. That is normal: Sulkyland does not race foals. In reality, a horse spends its first year growing without doing anything, and it is only at one year old that it starts being worked. The game skips that year: what appears in your stable is a one-year-old horse, ready to start its career.

What comes before exists all the same: as soon as the mating is validated, the foal to be born is in the game, and its card announces it as not born yet until the date comes. See breeding.

After that:

it gains a year on the 1st of each month. Arriving in January, it is 2 on 1 February, 3 on 1 March;
it races from 1 to 16 years old, and retires at 17 — that is sixteen months after its arrival.

A horse improves with age, then keeps what it has gained

On top of its training, a horse receives a speed bonus that comes from its age. It builds up day after day, and not at the same rate depending on the moment of its life:

in its first year, it progresses, but slowly;
at 2 and 3, this is the bulk of what it acquires: the progression is the fastest of its career;
at 4 and 5, it slows down markedly;
from 5 onwards, it is over: the bonus is acquired in full.

Two things to take from that, and they really do steer decisions.

A horse of 2 or 3 is not yet what it will be. Judging it on its first races is unfair: most of its age bonus is still to come. That is why a disappointing young horse is kept a little longer than one would like.

And that bonus never goes back down. A horse does not “decline” with age in Sulkyland: at 14 it keeps exactly what it had at 5. An old horse is therefore not a diminished horse — it is a horse that no longer progresses, which is not the same thing. What it lacks against a well-bred youngster is the genetic maximum of its generation, not its acquired speed. See One generation a month further down.

The bonus is a little more generous on Almina and Bezir than on Chorus, where genetics are played out on other scales.

You can also retire it whenever you like, at any age. A retired horse no longer races, is no longer sold, no longer breeds.

A mistake can be put right

Retirement can be cancelled: the Sell a horse screen also lists your retired horses, and offers Cancel the retirement, which gives the horse back its normal date.

Beware of what “its normal date” means: sixteen months after its arrival. For a horse retired before its time, that date is still ahead of it and it really does set off again. For a horse that had already finished its career, it has already passed: cancelling does not make it race any longer.

The delay, for its part, depends on its races — and it is longer than people think. A pass of the program, each night, makes the retirement final, but it only carries off the horses none of whose races appear in the game's archives any more; and races stay there for about two months. A horse that has raced recently can therefore be caught back for all that time.

Conversely, a horse that has never raced goes on the very next night. Which is just as well: that one, you retired because you did not want it.

What that pass does is irreversible: it keeps a memorial card of the horse — its name, its coat, its sex, its earnings, its scores, its parents — and deletes its genetics, its medals, its records, its contracts, its test, its notepads and its ownership history. Even giving it a retirement date back, it would not return: it no longer has any characteristics with which to race.

One thing escapes that clear-out, and happily so: its race history. It stays attached to the memorial card and is read from there, long after the horse has left the stable. See A horse's races.

And later, the memorial card itself disappears — unless the horse belongs to a living line, that is to say if it still has a parent or a descendant in activity. That is what keeps your horses' ancestors visible in their genealogy long after they have left the track.

The moral is simple: retirement is not a way of filing a horse away, it is a deferred deletion. To set a horse aside without losing it, use a folder; retirement is for the horses you do not want at all any more.

Its characteristics

Four everywhere, five on Chorus. Each does one precise thing, and it is worth knowing which:

Speed: the main characteristic. It is the pace the horse holds without tiring.
Resistance: what allows it to exceed its base speed, and to hold it longer. It is what decides what a jockey will be able to ask of it.
Suppleness: adaptation. It softens the effect of heavy turf, reduces the risk of falling over hurdles, and speeds up changes of pace — so it helps at the start.
Obedience: the ability to follow the jockey's instructions. More regularity, and less risk of a stride break in trot.
Constitution, on Chorus only: the speed of progression in training. It does not race, it makes the others progress.

A horse therefore does not need to be good at everything. A very obedient trotter that is average in suppleness, a supple jumper, a fast and resistant flat horse: there are several ways of being useful.

Progressing, and the ceiling

Each horse is born with a starting value and a maximum in each characteristic. All training consists in filling the gap between the two, and the maximum is never exceeded.

The card shows it by a colour and a symbol: far from the maximum, close to it, or arrived. A horse that has “arrived” everywhere will progress no further, whatever you make it do — that is the moment to race it, not to train it.

And what progresses is not the same thing depending on the world:

on Almina and Bezir, speed, resistance and suppleness progress through training; obedience, for its part, progresses through tests;
on Chorus, everything progresses through training, at a rate governed by constitution.

That is the fundamental difference between the worlds, and it changes the way a horse is worked. See My trainings.

Early or late developer: the gap counts as much as the maximum

A horse is therefore read with two numbers per characteristic: where it starts, and where it can go. The gap between the two is the work to be done — and the two extremes give two very different horses, which players call early developers and late developers.

A horse that starts high is an early developer: it is usable straight away, it can race and win in its first months. If its maximum is modest, its career will be shorter — but it will not be non-existent, and it begins immediately.
A horse that starts low with a high maximum is a late developer: it is worth nothing for months, then it can become formidable. It is the profile you need to win the big events, which bring fully made horses together — and that is also why it calls for a long period of training before bringing in anything at all.

The trick few players make use of

Early developers are underrated, and that is an opportunity to seize.

Experienced breeders chase late developers, because that is the only profile that wins the important competitions. As a result, early developers are easier to obtain in breeding, less sought after, and so cheaper to buy.

And they have an advantage the other profile will never have: you know what you have straight away. The birth genetics can be read the same day, whereas a high maximum is only confirmed after long months of training — and may disappoint.

For a player who is starting out, rebuilding a stable, or simply wanting results this week, it is therefore the best ratio between what you pay and what you get. An early developer races while a late developer trains.

One generation a month

Here is a point nobody works out alone, and which explains a great deal.

The genetic maximum of newborns rises with each generation, that is to say each month. Today's foals can therefore aim a little higher than those of six months ago. That is what makes the whole game progress, and what gives breeding a meaning over time.

But it would raise a problem: a six-year-old horse would be crushed by maximums it did not have at birth. The game corrects for that. A race's calculation brings the values back to a comparable equivalent, so that a six-year-old horse that would reach 63 in six months is worth exactly a six-year-old horse at 62 today.

Practical consequence: do not compare the raw figures of two horses of different ages. The card helps you, by displaying, when you hover over a genetic bar, the maximum of horses of the same age — that is the reference to compare with, not an absolute number.

The biorhythms

A horse has good days and bad days, and that is not a figure of speech: it is a value, which rises and falls.

On Almina and Bezir, one single biorhythm is displayed, the one for resistance. It follows a regular, periodic curve, particular to each horse, and the game shows it to you hour by hour over the last 48 hours. The graph therefore looks backwards, and it only shows a fragment of the cycle: the period varies from one horse to another, from a few days to a fortnight. Two days of observation are not enough to work it out.

The cycle itself, on the other hand, is stable: nothing in the horse's everyday life distorts it. By noting its biorhythm down for one or two weeks, you get a usable forecast, and that is the whole point: you can then choose to enter a horse on a day when it is high. Some horses never go above zero, others never below.

One single thing resets it: the intensive training course. It draws an entirely new curve, with no relation to the previous one. Your record becomes false overnight, and there is nothing to salvage from it: you have to start all over again.

And since the course is triggered by the trainer while it is paid for by the owner, that is one more reason to talk to each other beforehand. A well-meaning trainer can destroy two weeks of records without knowing they existed. See training.

You should know that there are nevertheless two of them, there as on Chorus: one for resistance and one for speed. On Almina and Bezir, only the resistance one is shown — but the speed one exists and counts in the result of the race. It is part of the unexplained when two similar races do not give the same time.

You cannot read it, but you can observe it: by following a horse's times and balanced times over several weeks, its highs and lows end up taking shape. It is patient amateur work, and it is also one of the rare advantages a player can build for himself without spending anything.

One case is worth knowing: on those two worlds, a gelding's biorhythm never goes below zero. Its troughs are turned into peaks, so it has no bad days at all. That is the real reason for gelding a male you do not want to make a stallion of — see Neuter.

On Chorus, there are two — speed and resistance — and they do not merely follow a curve: your actions move them. Training, a race or a test makes them shift. A race well used makes them rise; a horse pushed too hard, or not hard enough, makes them fall. And a fall over hurdles can send both plunging.

The biorhythm of a foal to be born is unknown: it is only discovered at birth, and it is not inherited. See breeding.

The score

The score is a horse's sporting measure, and it only moves in a regulated race — free races, cups and random genetics do not touch it.

There are two, kept separately: one for races without a handicap, one for races with a handicap. A horse can therefore be good in one and mediocre in the other.

At the finish, each gains the points of its place:

Place	1st	2nd	3rd	4th	5th	beyond
Points	5	4	3	2	1	0

Then comes the adjustment, which is the real heart of the system: the scores from before the race are compared, two by two. You gain a point for each better-rated opponent you beat, and you lose one for each lower-rated opponent that beats you.

Beating horses stronger than yourself therefore pays a lot, and being beaten by weaker ones costs dear. A horse that systematically races against small opponents will never climb high, even by winning everything. The score never goes below zero.

The balanced time

It is the horse's reference time, and its most comparable figure: its time brought back to the kilometre, then corrected for the distance, the turf and the discipline. The lower it is, the better.

Three rules govern it:

it is only calculated on races of 1,000 to 4,000 metres. A 400 m sprint or a 6,000 m marathon gives none;
a better time always replaces the old one;
after 30 days, the balanced time is out of date: the first following race replaces it, even if it is worse.

Hence two consequences that have to be known. A horse that stops racing loses its balanced time, and with it its place in the rankings. And a horse that comes back after a month's absence will be given the time of its comeback race, good or bad — so it is better for that comeback to be a serious one. It is also that expiry that sends a horse into maximum handicaps: see The races.

Its team

Four roles turn around one horse, and three of them are paid out of its earnings:

the owner enters it, pays the entry fees and collects the prizes;
the trainer makes it progress, and gets 7%;
the jockey rides it, and gets 11%;
the breeder has not done anything for a long while, and gets 2% — for life, even if the horse has changed hands ten times.

The first three roles can be held by the same player, and that is the case by default: when you buy a horse, you become owner, trainer and jockey all at once. The breeder, for his part, never changes — he is whoever owned the mare at conception.

Entrusting the training or the riding to another player is done by contract: see My contracts.

What is decided on a horse

For the record, and the detail is on its card: the name, the gelding of a male — which gains it obedience, spares it the bad biorhythm days on Almina and Bezir, and bars breeding for good —, the visibility of its genetics and its biorhythm (team, clan or everybody), its folders for finding it again in a large stable, its notepad, its picture, putting it up for sale and its retirement.

And three tabs for its history: its races, with the summary by age of its runs, wins and places; its medals; and its genealogy, parents and descendants.