Breed with a bought mating
Breed with a bought mating. You start from a mare and you choose, in your stock, the dose that will cover her. That is how one gets a foal born from a stallion one does not own.
A dose has been bought — see Buy a mating — and it lives in your stock until you use it: see Matings available.
Choosing the dose
The list of your available matings, with for each one the horse it comes from, its purchase price and its use deadline.
Two kinds of dose do not appear there: those of a different speciality from your mare, and those that are out of date. The list therefore shows only what can really serve — if you look for a dose there in vain, it is one of those two reasons.
The use deadline is the date to remember. A dose does not wait indefinitely: past that term, it is lost and the money with it. Look at it before buying, and still more before putting a mating off.
Then the verdict
The game announces the expected date of birth, or the refusal. The Breed button appears only in case of agreement.
The seven reasons for a refusal
Before writing anything at all, the game examines each mating and displays its verdict. A refusal always carries one of these reasons:
- Non-identical speciality. The sire and the dam must run the same speciality. It is the most frequent refusal, and the easiest to avoid.
- A mare for sale can't be bred. Withdraw the sale first.
- A stallion for sale can't breed. Same reason, from the other side.
- This mating exceeds the stallion's quota.
- This mare already has 2 foals waiting to be born. That is the maximum, and it cannot be got round.
- The foal would be born after the mare's retirement date. The trap of old mares: see further down.
- Mating prohibited, the catch-all message: the horse is not of the right sex, it does not belong to you, or it is not yet born.
Two of those refusals cannot happen here: there is no quota — a bought dose is yours, with no limit of number — and the stallion it came from may very well be for sale, that no longer concerns you. The dose is detached from him.
One dose, one foal
The dose is consumed only if the foal is conceived. If the mare has stopped being suitable between the verdict screen and your confirmation — one more foal waiting, a retirement become too close —, nothing is done and the dose stays in your stock. And a dose serves one mare only.
When the foal will be born
When the mating is accepted, the game does not say “all right” but “Ok for a birth on…”. The date is calculated, not chosen, and it obeys four constraints at once:
- A foal is always born on the 1st of a month.
- At the earliest 20 days after the mating.
- The mare must be at least three months old at the moment of the birth.
- And if she is already expecting a foal, at least 20 days after that one.
The date retained is the first that satisfies everything. In practice, count on one to two months between the mating and the birth.
The trap of old mares
It is the seventh reason for a refusal, and it surprises everybody once. A mare cannot be bred if the foal would be born after her own retirement — and since the birth is pushed back to the 1st of the following month, the window closes more than a month before the end of her career.
In other words: a mare with five weeks left to run is already barren. If you were counting on getting one last foal out of a good broodmare, do it two months before her retirement, not the week before.
What the foal receives
The genetics of the stallion it came from and those of your mare, its coat from both, and your breeding suffix: the dose is bought, but the foal's breeder is you. See breeding.
A detail that counts for pedigrees: the stallion it came from may be retired, or even gone, and his dose stays valid. A bought mating is the only way to have a foal born from a horse that is no longer there.