My mares

Your mares in activity, and for each the two foals she can have waiting: the expected date of birth and the Stallion that sired it. This is the screen where one breeds.

The gesture is simple. What takes know-how is choosing the right cross — and that is played out elsewhere, in breeding, which explains what is passed on and what is not.

Breeding

Tick one or more mares, and the actions menu then offers two ways:

Breed with one of my stallions: you then choose which of your stallions covers them.
Breed with a bought mating: you use a right bought from another player, taken from Matings available.

The confirmation window tells you the date before you validate, mare by mare: Ok for a birth on…. Read that line, it is the most useful piece of information in the whole operation — a mating taken too late will not give the birth you were expecting.

Why that date and not another

Foals are born always on the 1st of a month, and gestation lasts twenty days. A mating made on the 12th cannot therefore give a birth on the 1st of the following month: there are not twenty days between the two, and the birth will switch to the month after.

Two other rules sometimes push the date back:

a mare's first foal cannot be born before she is about 4 years old. The mating, on the other hand, can be taken well before: nothing forbids breeding a one-year-old mare, the date of birth simply being calculated accordingly;
when a mare is already carrying a foal, the next one cannot be born less than twenty days after the first. The two births are therefore a month apart.

You do not have to work all that out: the window does it and announces the result to you. But knowing where the date comes from saves you from believing in a bug.

When the mating is refused

The window judges each mare separately and tells you which one is the problem, with the reason.

Non-identical speciality: one crosses only between horses of the same speciality.
A mare for sale can't be bred — and a stallion for sale can't breed. Withdraw the sale first.
This mating exceeds the stallion's quota: he has no point left available.
This mare already has 2 foals waiting to be born: that is the maximum, a birth has to be waited for.
The foal would be born after the mare's retirement date: she has no time left. A mare at the end of her career thus stops being breedable before being retired.
Mating prohibited: the catch-all case — a horse that is not yours, a sex that does not fit, a mare not yet born.

A trap in batch matings: the stallion's quota is consumed mare by mare, in the order of the list. If you tick fifteen mares for a stallion who has only ten points, the last five will be refused for exceeding the quota. Look at the detail of the window rather than supposing that everything went through.

Good news on the other hand: the mares are read again from the database at the moment of judging. A mare sold, given away or retired since you opened the screen is treated on her real state, not on an aged display.

Reading the list

Each mare shows her genetics and her birth genetics. This second one is what counts for breeding: it is what gets compared with that of the produce, and that is how good broodmares are spotted. See breeding.

The Pregnant filter is the one you will use most: set to No, it isolates in one go the mares still free. To it are added the name, the speciality, the age, all the genetics, the notepad and your breeder's folders.

The breeder's notepad is displayed here: it is the place to note what a mare has given with such and such a stallion. Your memory will not hold twenty crosses, your notes will.

Preparing the foal's future

As soon as a mating is validated, the foal to be born exists for the game. You can therefore set its first training even before its birth: it will work from its very first day rather than waiting for you to think of it. See My trainings.