Avoiding inbreeding

I'm back at it with more questions lol

I've been doing fairly well starting my lines, but recently I've been running into problems with my 3rd generation horses (ugh). Most of them are related to almost all possible options for breeding. Shoot. I've obviously been over breeding and I haven't been paying close enough attention to who's been breeding with who.

So my question now is, what breeding strategy is everyone using? How to prevent inbreeding, over breeding and what age do you guys start breeding horses at? How to maximize breeding potential? 

I obviously need to tone it back on breeding fever. 

Any advice appreciated! Thanks all.

i pair up all my horses, every horse has a designated partner and i don't typically breed outside of that pairing. then i sell off (or try to sell off) all but one foal from each pairing. i do try to avoid visible inbreeding in the first page but it's not a big deal to me if it happens.

some people use spreadsheets to keep track of things, but by just making sure i have everyone paired together i've never run into trouble with the inbreeding block. i use numbers or letters in their names to remember who's paired with who and in the notes of each horse i have a link their partner's page as an extra safety measure.

even though i don't really breed for stats i still breed as late as possible out of habit, so at 17 years old or later and at minimum 10 years.

how many foals i do depends on what i'm going for, the more strict my criteria is the more foals i try to breed so i can pick out the best one possible. to keep the overall numbers down i reduce the amount of foals they can have through public breeding. so my range is roughly like: "no public breedings + 4 homebred foals each" to "unlimited public breeding + 1 homebred foal each".
i've gotten more relaxed about foal numbers over time because of updates making it ideal to breed more foals, the new confo one is probably going to affect it even more lol. though hopefully confo gets a little easier to breed for someday.

it also depends on the breed/discipline combination, i'm less inclined to breed many foals if it's already a popular one since i don't want to oversaturate the pool with my own lines. rare ones i'm not bothered about since hardly anyone besides me and a few others would be breeding for those anyway lol.


how to maximize potential just depends on what you're going for:

stats: breed just before retirement when your horses have their highest possible stats.
color: start breeding earlier to have a better chance of getting the color/pattern you want.
NSS/confo: breed several foals and see who has the lowest NSS/best confo from the bunch.