how do you decide on breeding pairs?

i'm curious how everyone decides on which mare to breed to which stallion within their own herd. do you breed high (stats/confo) to high and low to low, do you breed high to low? do you decide based on something else?

I think it depends on what you're breeding for?

if going for a particular color (i.e. not bay in arabians for me) I do my best to never pair up a horse with agouti to another that also has it. I also do my best, color wise, to pair up a horse with a plain base coat (black, bay, or chestnut) with a mate that has more dilutions. I also like to make pairs that have a higher likelihood of homozygous dilutions in their foals if possible.

confirmation wise I'm really just starting.
I've made sure to never pair two horses that have poors in the same category, and if at all possible I've tried to get store horses with very few poors. I'm four days away from the birth of my first batch of confirmation foals, so I'll figure out how well my method is working then :)

I'm all about the stats so when they are all foals I pair them up with high to low, that way I end up with the next generation hopefully being closer together in stats :)

So be prepared to read, cause this will be long.

First I'd say I try to breed for the best general horse I can. So I try not to ignore conformation, stats, or color when breeding a horse.

Normally I start by looking at the color, as this can be the most difficult to pair properly. I typically breed homozygous to the opposite homozygous gene to create heterozygotes (i.e. CrCr x crcr = Crcr) I pair heterozygotes to heterozygotes to try producing homozygotes (i.s. Crcr x Crcr = CrCr [if things go my way]). I normally just pair to try and keep desirable characteristics as long as possible in my herd. I rarely breed for a specific color, just for individual genes and the color that results from that is whatever it happens to be.

Conformation I breed high to low for the first generation, then I pair high to medium / medium to poor in the following generations. My goal with conformation is to have the foal exceed the average conformation of one of its parents. I'm not sure how well this will actually work or how difficult it will be to do, as I'm just getting to my second gens on this version of the game.

Stats are actually the last thing I consider in most breedings. As long as I know the foals will have higher stats than the parents were born with then I'm a happy Aglet. There are some breedings where I actually put stats first, but they are rare occasions.

As I said earlier I breed for the best general foal I can. If two horses would make amazingly colored foals, but produce low stats or low average conformation then I won't let the breeding occur.

My goal for 2nd gens is 300+ stats, 55+ average conformation, and retention of desirable traits (i.e. cream or sabino).

I am not one to "pair" horses, meaning that I have 4 active breeding stallions, and breed them to approximately 15-25 active broodmares at a time.

However, how I choose which mares I breed to my stallions, I look at color and what I want at that certain breeding time. For example, if I want a dunalino, I will breed my cremello stallion to all my ready-to-breed red dun mares, or my dunalino stallion to all my palomino and other horses with the cream or red gene. But if I want a brown or black based horse, I will breed bay, black or brown based mares to my seal cream stallion.

I also try to breed dun to dun, roan to roan, flaxen to flaxen, etc. to try and get homozygous genes (DD, RnRn, ff, etc) so I have some color producers.

I pair my horses highest stats to lowest, then I make sure my colors and patterns are spread out through all the pairs. That's it lol

I breed based firstly on color, trying to see what colors my breed allows and working within those parameters. I use generator games like http://citron--vert.deviantart.com/art/Genetic-game-171155097 and http://www.jenniferhoffman.net/horse/horse-color-genetics.html to help me see what genetics I need to get the colors I want and fill the gaps in that way. In later generations, once I get the colors I want, I will breed according to conformation that way I can keep the stats level with the herd.

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