Training a Racehorse

[larissar]

I've spent most of tonight actively testing out the training system. The primary goal was to evaluate the system, and think about changes which are need to balance things out. I have a lot of notes on how I'm going to change things, but overall the experience was actually a lot of fun so I thought I'd share what I did.

First I adopted a new horse. I picked a Liver Chestnut Arabian colt (http://www.horseworldonline.net/horse.php?horse_id=136) and decided to train him as a race horse. What I know about race horses is then need to be fast, and they can begin racing around 2 and a half years of age.
My cold has a pretty decent trainers report

This colt is pretty strong, looks nice. Well, his natural speed is good. Might want to consider racing this one. Appears to have plenty left after workouts. Looks good to me. This colt falls right in the middle, movement-wise. This colt keeps a nice, steady pace! This colt's balance is average. Appears to be a very agile colt, should do good for you. Your colt should pick up on things quickly.

So I'm quite sure he's got potential to be very successful. Now before I began training I checked my player skills. I'm currently maxed out on how training related skills so I'm getting a lot of bonuses during training from these.

The Training
My first goal was to build up the colts stamina so he could sustain heavy work. Since he's not going to be an endurance racer he only needed enough stamina to actually gallop on a track.

I started by lunging him in an arena for a couple months but it didn't take very long before I could lunge him at a gallop in the arena. About 6 months I think.

After that the goal was just to built his speed and stamina before he was 2 years and 6 months old.

By about 1.5 years old I was able to gallop him on the track and lunge him in the arena (for extra stamina) with occasional stamina-only days. He was much closer to 2 years before I could actually ride him at a gallop on the track for 5 minutes. Every few days I found it necessary to work on stamina only with 20 or 30 minute lunging sessions in the arena. By the time he was 2 years and 6 months old I could gallop him on a loose rein on the track for 5 minutes, followed by a 5 minute gallop in the arena.

He ended with these training stars:

training test.PNG

I think he'll need a lot more training in strength before he stands a real chance. Speed is important, but without strength he won't be able to accelerate much from the gate and might not have enough GO at the end of the race.

Overall not bad! I'll keep working him until he's 3 or 4 years old to see how it goes. Sure there is lots of room for improvement with game-play, balancing, etc. But I gotta say, I quite enjoyed this. It will be even more interesting (and potentially more challenging?) once more training skills are added in too.