Being a trainer

The trainer makes the horse progress. It is the most discreet role in the game, the least spectacular, and the one whose work shows over weeks rather than over a race.

It is also a trade one readily practises for others: it costs nothing, risks nothing, and brings in 7% of the race earnings of the horses in your charge.

You decide, the lad carries it out

There is nothing to trigger. You define a programme — the horse's daily round — and the game applies it once a day, by itself, day after day. The game calls the one who carries it out the lad, and the wording is exact: you are the trainer, he is the stable hand who follows instructions.

The consequence is that an absent trainer does not penalise his horses straight away: the programme in place goes on running. But it adapts to nothing, and that is where the trade begins.

Two practical details: the sessions are spread through the day, so your horse is not trained at a fixed hour; and there is no training between 3 and 5 in the morning, during the backup.

The trap you absolutely must know

A programme is attached to the trainer who defined it. If the horse changes trainer, the programme stops being applied — and the horse is not left with nothing: it goes over to automatic training, the webmaster's.

In other words, a new contract does not begin when you accept it, but when you save your first programme. In between, you draw your 7% for work the game does in your place, and does badly.

For automatic training has no subtlety at all, and not in the same way depending on the world:

• on Almina and Bezir, it follows a rigid order: everything on speed up to the maximum, then everything on resistance, then everything on suppleness. Mechanical, and never aimed at the races you have in mind.
• on Chorus, the priorities are drawn at random for each session and the effort is always set to the lowest — Light. A horse handled that way does progress, but slowly and in every direction at once.

The real work: measuring

No help will tell you which round makes what progress. That is deliberate: discovery is part of the game, and it is what distinguishes a good trainer from a player ticking boxes.

The instrument is in the training window: two columns, Average progression and Total progression, which measure what your programme has really produced since it was put in place. A serious trainer sets a programme, lets it run long enough for the average to mean something, notes the result, then tries something else.

And you need to know that saving a programme again resets those counters to zero. That is the classic mistake: you reopen the window to look at your figures, you confirm out of reflex, and the measurement under way is lost. The detail of the screen is in Training a horse.

Each horse's notepad is made for this. What you note down will serve you in a month, when you no longer remember what you had tried.

What can be worked on is not the same from one world to another

On Almina and Bezir, training bears on three characteristics: speed, resistance, suppleness. Obedience, for its part, cannot be trained at all — it rises through tests, and is therefore the jockey's business, not yours. See riding.

On Chorus, training bears on five characteristics — obedience and constitution, which exist only there, being added to the other three — and it shapes the horse's biorhythm as well. The trade is distinctly broader there, and tests, for their part, bring in nothing.

Another difference of size: on Chorus, each section is set in length and in effort, and the total distance of the round multiplies every gain. A programme that does not use the horse's maximum distance leaves potential aside, and since that maximum distance rises with constitution, a programme that is right today becomes too short in a few weeks. You have to come back to it.

Something you find out late

It is not the four sections taken separately that make the session, but their sequence: the gain is calculated on the passages from one section to the next. The same four kinds of ground in a different order therefore do not give the same result.

That is all it is useful to know, and it is a great deal: it means that the order is to be tested too.

The trade comes to an end

When a horse reaches its maximum everywhere, there is nothing left to train and the game stops its sessions. That is the moment to hand back the contract and look for another: your work on that horse is over, and your 7% will go on coming in without your having anything to do with it.

Conversely, a young horse whose characteristics are far from their maximums is a good contract: there is room, therefore visible work. Statistics shows you how your string is spread by age.

What you cannot do

Enter a horse in a race. Only the owner and the jockey can — the entry costs the owner sulkies, so it belongs to him. See The races.

Spend the owner's money without asking. The intensive training course is in your hands, but it costs 20,000 sulkies to the owner and can injure the horse. The window shows you his balance, in fact. Ask for his agreement: it is not your money, and it is not your horse.

Going further

The screens of the trade: My trainings, My methods, My contracts, The races, Statistics. And for what training does to a horse over its whole career, The horses. The role that entrusts you with the horses is described in ownership.