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On Showcattle.com I have spent most of the month in the top 25 now, so perhaps it isn't hubris if I say I've learned some important points about how to climb up that ranch ranking board and finally publish these guidelines.
How to climb up the Ranch Rankings - first,
think carefully about whether this is how you want to play the game. You can enjoy an artificial life game a lot just managing your virtual animals, and with more than a thousand active ranches on Showcattle.com, you may not want to stress over trying to break onto that board of the top 100 overall. You can easily play "against the bank" and concentrate on making your ranch profitable, or concentrate on the ranch rankings for a specific breed.
But if you want to see your name in the top 100, here are some tips:
Enter shows every day. Even if you can only afford to show one cow, take it to as many shows as you can. On Showcattle it is easy to enter shows in advance, and nothing will make your ranking drop faster than missing a few days of shows!
Show competitive breeds. The more cattle you beat in a show, the more points your animal brings home! A Breed Champion win for a Balancer bull earned 25 points on 10/30; a Breed Champion win for an Angus bull earned 105 points because he'd beaten more animals. That's a big difference that adds up quickly.
The top 15 breeds on the site can be seen on the front page:http://www.showcattle.com/SimSteer/Consider, however, that
you need to show good stock, and that it is easier to acquire good cows in breeds with less competition. You will always take home 5 points for each entry, but quantity alone will not get you on the ranch rankings. If none of your cattle place, then even if you have the virtual money to enter the maximum number of cows in each and every show, those 5 points will not add up fast enough to get you in the top 100. (An example - on today, December 20th, if you had entered 40 poor cattle in shows a day, you would have 40 cows X 5 points X 20 days = 4,000 points - and ranch #100 has 5,294.)
You will have to find the breeds that are right for you - ones in which you can build a respectable herd and still face the amount of competition that you want. It will take time to build a good herd, especially in the competitive breeds.
Show as many cattle as you can afford to. Show both steers and breeding stock.Although I have just stressed the importance of quality over quantity, if you have good cows (at my ranch this means bringing in 10 points or more a show) and the money to pay their entry fees, don't leave them in the pasture!
Don't underestimate the power of steers. :) Don't be afraid to castrate
any of your bull calves who aren't better than the bulls currently available in the breed --- you can buy another bull or semen to breed your cows, but once a calf is two weeks old, you cannot castrate him.
Steers are only half of an "animal unit" throughout their lives, and they are the only animals who can win money in shows.
Use your ranch rankings and your show results to analyze your weaknesses. For example, I'm currently ranked #24 overall, #23 in Overall Bulls, and #18 in Overall Females. I am not ranked in steers. This tells me that steers are my weak point, and that I should be looking for oportunities to buy or breed better ones. I also look at my show results to identify cows who are not placing in shows and remove them from my show string.
And if you are ready to charge in and win fame and glory,
save your resources for the beginning of a month. The ranch rankings are completely reset on the first day of every month!
But don't take my word for it -
at any time, you can "spy" on the top-ranked ranches by clicking on their names, then on "Recent Show Results" to see exactly what each player is showing and how it is placing.
Coming soon in the Showcattle series... Evaluating cattle and Breeding strategy; then I'll edit it all together into a single document. :)
