Breed percentages

[Emiisheartless2]

So… how do breed percentages work? How are they calculated? Why in the world do two 1% Belgians give me an 11% Belgian??
EH Henry

This one is the result of two full siblings, both 24% Belgian. Why does the breed percentage increase each generation?
I find decreasing the breed percentage quite straightforward. A 100% Belgian bred to a grade horse gives a 50% Belgian. Breeding that horse to a grade gives 25% and so on so forth. But when increasing the percentage, I feel like it jumps up almost randomly. Can someone explain this?

[Cigogne]

So… how do breed percentages work? How are they calculated? Why in the world do two 1% Belgians give me an 11% Belgian??
EH Henry

This one is the result of two full siblings, both 24% Belgian. Why does the breed percentage increase each generation?
I find decreasing the breed percentage quite straightforward. A 100% Belgian bred to a grade horse gives a 50% Belgian. Breeding that horse to a grade gives 25% and so on so forth. But when increasing the percentage, I feel like it jumps up almost randomly. Can someone explain this?

I'm far from an expert on this but here's a few guesses:
1. The breed percentages are an estimate, and not entirely accurate. Maybe the more mixed your horse's DNA is, the more rough that estimate gets.
2. Your horses are so mixed that the game places more importance on the one breed it can recognise?
3. Inbreeding - somewhere along the line, some of the ancestors were related. My maths skills are extremely rusty so feel free to correct me if this is wrong, but if both the dam and sire's lines both stem from the same Belgian ancestor, wouldn't that Belgian show up an extra time in the descendant's ancestry? So, if the genetics of a horse are calculated based on how much of its ancestry traces back to Belgians rather than what we intuitively think (two parents with 24% = offspring with 24%, as we're just counting every unique ancestor, and we wouldn't count the same one twice), the bloodline that traces back to that common Belgian ancestor would be counted twice. It's the sum of a bloodline. I think. I don't know why it would be calculated this way, though.

I'm confusing myself writing it out so don't quote me on any of this

[BlackOak2]

So… how do breed percentages work? How are they calculated? Why in the world do two 1% Belgians give me an 11% Belgian??
EH Henry

This one is the result of two full siblings, both 24% Belgian. Why does the breed percentage increase each generation?
I find decreasing the breed percentage quite straightforward. A 100% Belgian bred to a grade horse gives a 50% Belgian. Breeding that horse to a grade gives 25% and so on so forth. But when increasing the percentage, I feel like it jumps up almost randomly. Can someone explain this?

I'm far from an expert on this but here's a few guesses:
1. The breed percentages are an estimate, and not entirely accurate. Maybe the more mixed your horse's DNA is, the more rough that estimate gets.
2. Your horses are so mixed that the game places more importance on the one breed it can recognise?
3. Inbreeding - somewhere along the line, some of the ancestors were related. My maths skills are extremely rusty so feel free to correct me if this is wrong, but if both the dam and sire's lines both stem from the same Belgian ancestor, wouldn't that Belgian show up an extra time in the descendant's ancestry? So, if the genetics of a horse are calculated based on how much of its ancestry traces back to Belgians rather than what we intuitively think (two parents with 24% = offspring with 24%, as we're just counting every unique ancestor, and we wouldn't count the same one twice), the bloodline that traces back to that common Belgian ancestor would be counted twice. It's the sum of a bloodline. I think. I don't know why it would be calculated this way, though.

I'm confusing myself writing it out so don't quote me on any of this

The percentage of the breed is made to increase in certain ways so that we can breed them back to pureblood. The exact ways it calculates this, I don't know. However, the calculation for breeding back to purebred is working correctly. But working with an unnamed-other-breed mixes (like your mixed belgian) does seem to calculate percentages a little differently than a named-other-breed mixes (like mixed belgian x arab). At least, when breeding back to pure arab, I came across some interesting percentage foals that popped out differently than what I thought they should.