Colt Overload

[Argent II]

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What are your thoughts?

[Aela]

Wow, I have the exact opposite problem! Had 8 fillies yesterday and not a single colt

[Argent II]

I think, for me at least, that it's sometimes a perceived imbalance between colts and fillies because I only keep the best colt from each foal crop and colts are on average higher quality in terms of Breeders' Report, but I keep multiple fillies and they're consistently less impressive. So I spend more time looking at the colts because I have to pick the single best one, but fillies kind of get a free pass.

[Alana]

Or simply an option to sell to NPC buyers, perhaps a well trained gelding could actually be worth more to the NPC:s than say a stallion or mare, maybee even a lot more

[Buzzsaw]

In the real world geldings are preferred because they're easier to handle, and most show horses are geldings (there are exceptions, racing, for example). In the world of horse sims geldings are harder to sell than colts, most people don't want to buy a horse you can't breed, that's just the way it is.

[Buzzsaw]

Finally! I just got a filly!

[Argent II]

In the real world geldings are preferred because they're easier to handle, and most show horses are geldings (there are exceptions, racing, for example). In the world of horse sims geldings are harder to sell than colts, most people don't want to buy a horse you can't breed, that's just the way it is.

This is true of Anglo and Anglo-influenced cultures, but stallions have been the preferred riding horses for centuries and continue to be in most Spanish and Spanish-influenced cultures, many of which do not eve geld horses or even bother to train mares.

[kidhedera]

I think there's always a delicate balance between fun and realism in a sim like this, and that lowering the chance of colts being born might be one of those situations where fun/playability needs to win out.

[Buzzsaw]

This is true of Anglo and Anglo-influenced cultures, but stallions have been the preferred riding horses for centuries and continue to be in most Spanish and Spanish-influenced cultures, many of which do not eve geld horses or even bother to train mares.

The use of stallions in Spanish culture is heavily tied in with Bullfighting, which is now in decline. Arabs traditionally didn't geld their stallions, but rode mares. However, worldwide, there are more geldings than stallions. None of this helps with the situation at hand, it's just to illustrate the disparity between real life and games.

Quite a few games allow you to have unlimited horses, on these games stallions and mares are pretty much equally represented in sales markets, mainly because you have space to keep all your horses.

Here, space is at a premium (literally - we have to pay for it!) so excess colts quickly become expendable. Some people are happy to cull them, and at this point I have to interject that if I was a parent I would not let my child play this game for this very reason. (Happily I'm not, so - yay!)
Before you all pile in and say it's only deleting a bit of code, yes I know that's all it is, but it's the implied message that is being hammered into impressionable young minds from society as a whole, which is it's ok to just discard stuff, when it really isn't. Wouldn't it be nice to teach kids to be responsible in a fun way for a change?

Our local animal shelter had to take in pets because they "Didn't match the furniture" "We were going on holiday" "He/She is too old".
Is it too much to ask to teach people to be responsible while having fun?
Rant Over...

Any how, there are still twice as many males as females for sale in the market, so clearly there is still a problem, I wonder if something as subtle as a 55/45% shift in favour of fillies would make a difference?
As an experiment, I'm logging every birth on my farm, to see if things will even out over time.

[Lakewood]

Whenever I'm trying for a new breed I tend to get a colt (or a few) first in that specific breed, before I get a filly. But today I managed to get a filly on my other account which is first of her kind (French trotter). So that was a nice surprise!