This page applies to: Virtual Animals

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Virtual Horse Ranch - Game Guide

This is an amazingly complex game, and this guide only scratches the surface! It also has the best Help system that I have seen yet --- almost every element of a horse can be clicked on for a pop-up description. This guide is simply designed to introduce you to the game.

In Virtual Horse Ranch you raise, train, show and breed horses. Both artificial genetics and artificial intelligence are simulated and each horse is unique. These are probably the most complex horses simulated! One unique feature of the site is that individual players control how many virtual days pass each real day by "taking turns" at the game.

Like Horseland, there's a lot of clicking here. But unlike Horseland, this clicking is purposeful. Instead of merely entering a horse in as many shows as you can to earn points, you must develop a strategy for training, feeding, showing, and breeding your horses. Because of the amount of strategy involved it is less friendly to young players.

Tips for Finding A Horse

You cannot create a horse. You need to find one for sale and buy it from another player.

• Check the Bulletin Board first. Many players who want to sell horses quickly price them low and post a notice here.
• This web site lists a bunch of horse breeds. You can see what breeds look like and learn their histories, then search for a horse in the marketplace.
• Buy a young horse so that you have the option of breeding it after you train it.
• Buy a good horse. Look for the words "Excellent," "Superb" and "Fantastic" where a horse's abilities are described.

What do you do each virtual day?

Each virtual day or turn, you can train a horse up to 6 times or until it runs out of energy. If you use up more than 90% of a horse's energy it will suffer from acute exhaustion, and it will take a couple of turns to recover. If you notice that your horse is running out of energy before you have been able to give it six training sessions in a turn, consider increasing the amount of grain and hotoats in its diets to increase its energy (although too much will cause colic).

Choosing which of the many training options you will use on each horse each turn is a large part of the strategy of this game. Different options use different amounts of energy and increase the horse's stats in different ways. You have two different goals: to increase each individual stat as much as possible and to reach level 15 in training.

What area I train my horse in? First, look at what your horse is naturally good at. Excellent is the best, followed by Fantastic, Superb, Extremely Good, Very Good, Good, etc. (The full list is under Stat Titles in the lower left of the page.) Look at the training guide to see which events will use those talents!

What do I train my horse in every day? As a new player, the Trial Events are your best friend! Enter your horse in a Trial Event in the event that you would like it to compete in. You will get instant detailed feedback about your horse's skills and suggestions about training. You may even want to print this page out!

When you train your horse, read the paragraph that appears carefully, because it will give you even more information than the chart. For example, this is the description of Speed lap on track: "Excercizing your horse on the track can increase its speed, strength, and racing skills. Factors that Decide how succesfuly you are in training on the track, are your horses current condition, energy, diet, and it's current level (the higher the level and speed, the slower it gains.) Since the excercize is so simple, it can spoil some of the horse's intelegence. It is important to understand that this is not a therapeutic excercize, and if the horse is injured, this stressful workout could increase the severity of an injury."

Or, if you know that you want to work on certain stats, choose a training program that increases them. You may be more concerned with reaching that magic 450 points (see Breeding below) than level 15. The "Information on Training Types" link above the training choices will tell you what each training option does to your horse.

Important point: make sure to choose a training option that increases your horse's training level (skills). Other training options (for example, giving a racehorse dressage practice) will help your horse but will not help it reach level 15 in training. If new players don't realize this, it can cause a lot of frustration because their horses never go up in level even after many, many virtual days.

Here is the result of a session training a young Falabella stallion (who specializes in Western) in polo:

You should train each horse in your stable a little bit every day, and then "take a turn" and go to the next virtual day. Free Accounts have a turn added once an hour. You will pay to feed each of your horses when you advance a day, and you will be taken to a Morning Stable Report on your horses.

Once you've gotten started and taken a few turns, you will probably find that the help files make a lot more sense! Don't forget that they are a wealth of information about the subleties of adjusting training and diet. And if you pay for a Sponsor account, you will be able to gain skills that make it easier to train horses.

What do you do each real day?

After you train your horses and advance them however many virtual days you want to, there are some other tasks to take care of before logging out.

Each real day you should look at the competitions being run. If some of your horses are well-trained, look for competitions to enter them in. These competitions are run by the competition sponsor at least 24 hours after they are created. (The "countdown" in red is the earliest that the competition can run; it may be hours or days later before it actually runs.) Make sure that any of your horses entered in competitions are fully rested and have lots of energy before you leave --- you will want to advance another day if you have trained them.

Players with free accounts may also want to place bets on unrun competitions. (Don't worry! Unlike some other horse racing games on the Internet, only fake money is involved!) Since free players are not given money, betting is an important part of your stable's income.

If you have any horses that you plan to sell, put them up for sale and post a brief message on the Bulletin Board or Forum.

Breeding

This is not really a game where you want to jump in and start breeding horses. You pay to feed each horse that you own each time that you take a turn, so you want to keep your total number of horses low if you are planning to take a lot of turns to train a good horse.

When a horse has earned 450 points, a message in blue text appears next to its name: "This horse has reached a statistic cap, meaning its natural stats are slowly beggining to evolve (in a positive manner). Since the horse has reached a cap of sorts, its actual stats start to decay or remain balanced." You can (and should) continue to train the horse. What may happen is that there may be a "stat roll" and its natural abilities (the words Excellent, Superb, etc) will increase. For example, a horse that is naturally "Good" may become "Very Good."

This game implements Lamarckian Evolution. Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) proposed that creatures evolve because they are able to inherit acquired characteristics; for example, a giraffe's neck is long because giraffes have stretched for generations.

Current evolutionary theory says that instead giraffes born with necks a tiny bit longer had a tiny advantage and so were able to leave more offspring, and that inherited characteristics will only be based on genes and not on changes to the animal during its lifetime.

So "stat rolling" is probably not scientifically correct, but you will get better foals if you wait until you have trained your horse to breed it. Colts are much more rare than Fillies so do not be surprised if the first horses you breed are all female. Both of these deviations from real life have the goal of making selective breeding faster.

If you're still lost after reading this and the help files,

The official forum is a good place to ask for help. You do have to sign up for this in addition to signing up for the simulation to post messages.

There is also an unofficial VHR Livejournal community.

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