A Few Questions About Dressage

[Banafrit]

After successfully training a few horses in dressage and then tanking eventing them I figured I should ask before I continue any further.

1) How do you decide what foals will make good Dressage candidates?
I tried trial eventing to see how their conformation, disposition and movements looked but then I realized I didn't have a clue at what I was looking at! Is it preferred that conformation be low and disposition and movements be high? The mare that I bred had a conformation score of 18 when trail evented under Dressage so I thought it would be best to use a stallion with a score of 16 to bring it down and ended up with foals with conformation scores of 11. Is this good? Bad? Completely irrelevant?

2) Is it best if you are using German Warmbloods to have a build of medium or is slim okay as well?
I have noticed most of the high earners are medium, but I have a few horses which have short lines and most of them have slim builds.

3) When beginning training, do you use obstacle 6 times per turn or halter activities?
I read in a training guide to use halter activities but when I used it for some reason it wasn't increasing the stats very much as opposed to when I tried using obstacle.

4) Draft shoes or Weighted shoes?
Movement is the most important but there are still players who swear by the draft shoes.

5) With the new system at what age should you start eventing?
I started mine at 5.5 but they seemed to be way behind the competition. I think most were are 7 years old.

I felt like I had more questions but they aren't coming to me now...

Any other tips and advice would be great, I would really love to pursue Dressage a little more. Thank you in advance to any replies!

[quasarsmom]

I can answer 3: I use obstacle training 6 times.

[Dukes]

1 & 2): These basically tie in together. Thankfully, picking a foal with the new system is relatively easier as it doesn't focus so much on the "other" quirks as it did before (because you're not packing 20+ nearly identical horses in one event - there's a lot more space & range now). Depending on the type of player you are though there's still "things" you can look for. Like height & build being close to breed standard - these are typically the only two things I check, but I suppose you could take personality into account as well. Height is fairly easy to check, just check the breed standard by clicking the breed name on your horse's page & then look at your horse. It doesn't have to be spot on, but if you're a stickler then the closer you can get it the better. Now here's where I'll answer #2. The build your HORSE displays is not always "truthful." A horse who's build says medium could in actuality be closer to breed standards than a horse who's build says 'slim.' So for example, this guy is a medium build, but he's only 'Showing larger Build than of breed (+ 0.0129 )' - that's still VERY close. Now if I had a slim horse who totaled out more than that I would show you, but I don't at the moment I am fairly picky about that. So it really doesn't matter if you use 'medium' or 'slim' as long as they're close in conformation to the standard.

3) Obstacle. Halter only adds .01 even in the beginning. It'll add .6+ to Strength, but that's not the important stat.

4) Weighted.

surefoot 6 % (676.686)
movement 12 % (175.33) <--- Most important stat
strength 8 % (804.58) <--- Not so important
speed 0 % (0)
endurance 4 % (419.046)
intellegence 10 % (2049.11)

5) You're going to want to start at 7yrs. At 5.5yrs they aren't even hitting the age bonuses yet. There's also the fact that many players are entering MUCH older horses into lower level events - so you want to give your horses the best possible change.

[Banafrit]

Thank you You have both been very helpful!