I have been playing HEE for a year now, and when I started I was determined to play the same way as I have other breeding sims - starting my own lines from scratch (or in this case, wild captures). Historically I have always found it way more satisfying to breed up the ranks/leaderboards myself rather than piggy backing off already established lines. But after 12 seasons on HEE I have almost nothing to show for it, other than a few hundred pretty show geldings.

In the last two seasons I have started focusing heavily on matching horses based on training strengths and weaknesses instead of just going off ratings (ei. a WEE bred to an EWW) but the matching has given me the worst two crops of foals i've had so far, with 1 or 2 keepers out of 80+. I get that some horses can have great ratings and be terrible producers, but for real, i feel like my entire herd is physically unable to breed UP rather than DOWN. I have done some researching and seen that wild captures are notorious for being bad producers, so it seems it doens't matter how many WEE and WWE wilds I gather, they probably won't give me babies with the same ratings.

Anyway. super long post because my latest round of breed ratings were depressing and now I am considering purging nearly everything and starting over, and just buying 2 or 3 LB bred mares and matching them to LB studs. Yay or neigh?

Or will my 'foundation' lines eventually breed up instead of down? obviously I know quality over quantity, but how on earth do i make my own "quality" when 80% of my foals are so much worse than their parents D: