Conformation Study

[mythirion]

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Foreword - This will be a long read and indepth look into breeding, most notably for conformation. This is also aimed towards upgraded players that can view the specifics of conformation,
but may help guide those who can't by offering a bit more of an idea of what you want features to fall.

About the Project

This is currently a large work in progress. I will be updating this frequently. I have currently started with an insight into hunters/dressage as that is where my own projects lie, but I will be looking into other disciplines in the near future. If there is one you'd specifically like to see sooner rather than later, drop me a ping!

One area I want to start to look more into is conformation. Even when I was just dabbling in the game previous years, I wanted to create the best hunter I could conformationally more than anything. While this is only a portion of the puzzle and BR may present more information to us on how the horse's genetics are structured, I feel like peeking at the conformation and working to create the strongest form you can may give the competitive edge I'm seeking. As my data starts to fall into place - which I will be sharing in due time - it appears to me that conformation tends to lead function. So I've been looking into finding a winning form.


Functional Form

What we know about conformation is its not as straightforward as we wish it was! I have spent a lot of time scouring through a number of horses trying to find what tips the scores and where the sweet spots might like. For instance, when we look at how the jowl affects movement:

A thick jowl can hinder movement by restricting flexion at the poll. A heavier head, influenced by a thick jowl, can be advantageous to agility.

In theory, you want a shallow jowl in order to maximize movement here. So we take the sliding scale to the far left and that gives us +4 for movement:



But if we take the scale a little bit to the right, we can actually pull out a higher movement and end up with +9. That would put our sweet spot somewhere around here:



And so leads me to my quest with this post - a look into where we can maximize our conformation scores towards specific disciplines. While I think I have found the maximum scores for each area, if anyone has found otherwise - let me know!

RoyalCrownAcres did up a great list for all the conformation points that will add to specific stats here: The Perfectly Disciplined Horse

From here it's a matter of picking and choosing what points will give you the most for your chosen discipline. For hunters or dressage movement, strength, tempo and balance are considered in competition. So we take those four stats from the list:

Movement
Shallow jowl
Medium neck
Sloping shoulders
Low point of shoulder
Flat haunch
Back set stifle
Uphill build

Strength
Convex/Roman head
Long face
Thick jowl
Short neck
Sloping haunch
Long hip
Thick legs
Medium, slightly short back
Uphill build

Tempo
Concave head
Sloped shoulders
Low point of shoulder
Long back
Level croup height

Balance
More convex head
Long face
Medium neck
Flat haunch
Thick legs
Longer back

Some of these stats start to contradict one another, so we have to go through and decide how best to get the most out of our breeding. I want to maximize movement first and foremost, then try to get what I can for strength without compromising movement, followed by tempo and lastly balance. I plan to go through each discipline with a fine toothed comb to see where conformation scores can be improved. I won't delve into that too much here, but you can find the information below.


Generalized Musings

As I'm starting to look into different disciplines and key points of conformation, I'm noticing some interesting things popping up where you may get a wide array of differing additions for the exact same spot on the sliding scale. Hip length is a good example of such:




When I hit this I got wondering what other factors could be at play here. My first thought was to check the BR comments related to speed. But the horse with +10 strength had a high gold comment and oddly enough, the horse with +12 strength had a neutral comment. Ok, so not BR strength related. Weird.

So I took a peek at the speed comments, since the speed is also affected and different here. And what I found was that the +10 strength horse had a higher speed comment than the +12 strength horse. So it appears that in this case, speed is a limiting factor for strength. Decrease the speed BR comments and you should see an increase in the strength conformation.

When I started my initial project of looking at conformation, I didn't dive too deeply into instances I found where two horses essentially had the "same" conformation for a particular trait but had differing stats compensated. This has popped up a few times in my hunt - the hip length being only one instance. Another instance was leg thickness:




However, as I was browsing I selected 2 very similar horses with the same leg thickness that offered different stats. Not a huge difference in their build or even much difference in their BR comments to note here either. Makes me wonder how much of a random factor may be involved or if there's more to how they play together. I believe I will be looking into this further down the line as we go. In the case of where I've started on hunters/dressage/driven dressage and cross country, they all require balance as well, so I've chosen the second option where strength decrease and balance increases - but there may be instances where you want that extra point in strength.


Updates

Jan 26/24 - Yesterday, I finished up my initial look into hunter/dressage/driven dressage and cross country. I've noticed a number of things I am making note of to look into later but for now, I will continue my original project of just finding how you can maximize conformation towards specific disciplines. Today I am working on saddleseat, and plan to work on obstacle and marathon driving. Feel free to ping me or message me about any questions, comments or other ideas you may have - I love a good discussion that gets you thinking!

Jan 25/24 - I've finished the initial hunter/dressage conformation study with images to help. I may go further indepth at a later point, but it seems there is some interest in other disciplines as well so I want to try to get some of those out there as well. If you have different information or numbers, let me know! These are just the numbers I've found in my hunt and may obviously differ.

[mythirion]

Hunters, Dressage & Driven Dressage

Hunters are a bit of a passion of mine. You simply cannot beat the effortless beauty of a good hunter round. My own foundation mare as I venture into the breeding realm while I build my training business, is a stunning hunter-type Irish Sport Horse who I competed very successfully for a season in the 3'6 Performance Hunters. It only makes sense where my passion-project on HWO has come from!

My goal is to produce a strong line of competitive hunters that may also cross into dressage or driven dressage, as the three disciplines require the same stats in slightly varying order.

Movement - Strength - Tempo - Balance

The first part of my project wrapped up early 2024 as I bred my first Irish Sport Horses. Since, I have been working to increase my HGP with a focus on improving movement breeder's report comments and conformation. I have a strong line of Thoroughbreds and Irish Sport Horses with gold/green movement, and gold tempo and balance. While the majority of this has been achieved by just breeding "up" and saving only improving scores, we have now hit a standing point where I just can't seem to get more. So this last little while I've been diving more into the logistics of it and studying exactly what may go into creating the perfect hunter.

Movement
Shallow jowl
Medium neck
Sloping shoulders
Low point of shoulder
Flat haunch
Back set stifle
Uphill build

Strength
Convex/Roman head
Short neck
Sloping haunch
Long hip
Thick legs
Medium, slightly short back
Uphill build

Tempo
Concave head
Sloped shoulders
Low point of shoulder
Long back
Level croup height

Balance
More convex head
Medium face
Medium neck
Flat haunch
Thick legs
Longer back

Underlined points overlap in each stat and will be kept. Red points are contradicting points and will be set aside in favor of another.

Movement

Starting with the most obvious, I want to maximize everything towards movement. There are 7 areas covered under conformation that can contribute to raising your conformation score: jowl, neck length, withers/shoulder angle, point of shoulder, hip angle, stifle placement and croup height. Adding these scores gives us a maximum of 71 that can be achieved in movement.










Strength

Strength is a bit harder to incorporate into lines for whatever reason. Because of this, I want to maximize what I can get out of it. Strength can be added using face profile, length of neck to a degree, hip length, leg thickness, croup height and back length which I will touch on later. Using those five later points and keeping movement primarily, you can work it put to a minimum of 44.







A few things to note that I am not choosing to add more strength through the neck because that will hinder the return on movement, as will a thick jowl and a sloped hip. The last point of interest is back length - but I will discuss this one later as you have a few options that could work here.

Another point of interest is in the hip length. From what I can tell, the difference in strength value is determined by the speed factor in the breeder's report. The strength comments on these 2 horses vary greatly - the horse showing +10 strength has a gold comment whereas the one show +12 has a neutral comment. In theory, you would expect the gold comment to lead to a higher strength conformation, but what's actually happening is the speed comment is like a limiting factor. The +10 strength horse has a higher speed comment than the other so it looks like it's dropping the strength conformation in favor of speed.





Tempo and Balance

Tempo and balance I decided to just lump together because as I was working away on movement in my own lines, they just seemed to follow naturally. And as we can see from my list above, all the points I want to touch on, have already been covered through movement and strength conformation. So I'd we only work towards movement and strength, we end up with tempo and balance both sitting around 17. While these aren't awesome numbers by any means, we have two last pieces of conformation we can chose to use to boost tempo and balance OR strength.

*Face length, which we haven't already touched on, will add a great deal of balance, as seen in the image below. This will bring up your balance greatly, to a 28.




Back Length

Back length is the last piece we haven't yet covered. I wanted to cover this one on its own because you can take it a few different ways to maximize your conformation. A shorter back will work towards strength while a slightly longer back will add tempo and balance. This is where I may want to play with a few variations and see where their competitive scores may fall.

To start I might look at adding strength, simply because it's higher on the list than tempo and balance - and therefore weighs more when it comes to evaluating the horse. If I breed for strength in back length, I have a bit more wiggle room as there seems to be a small window that adds 8 to strength, bringing us up to 52 strength.




Alternatively, we may decide to up our tempo and balance to a more competitive value by adding so.e length to the back. This will add up to 12 to each value and put our tempo at 29 and our balance at 40:



Either route may be a viable enough option to offer some play here. I've decided here to use Silverine's Discipline Potential Evaluation to determine where these last efforts may be best put in.

Option A - Strength
Movement: 71
Strength: 52
Tempo: 17
Balance: 28




Option B - Tempo and Balance
Movement: 71
Strength: 47
Tempo: 29
Balance: 40

Here it becomes apparent that I would get slightly higher scores in if I put my focus on a longer back versus a shorter one for any of the three disciplines.


Dressage and Driven Dressage

I decided to cover hunters, dressage and driven dressage under one heading because they require the same four traits in only slightly varying order: dressage requires more balance and tempo than strength while driven dressage asks for more balance and strength than tempo. That being said, I probably wouldn't change my goals much aside from wanting a long back for sure to bring up my balance scores.

[mythirion]

Cross Country

So I want to get started working on some of the less popular disciplines for the time being - because they aren't as popular, there's less data floating around from players that have experimented. Cross Country is proving to be a rather interesting one and it's showing a few different things you have to start considering that wasn't apparent with hunters/dressage/driven dressage.

A movement based discipline with fairly complimentary traits was pretty simple and straightforward. Increase movement, tempo and balance seemed to follow. Add in some strength traits to compliment the movement, and you're set. Cross country is a bit of a different story. There are a few places showing up where increasing one traits leads to big decrease in another, though there is a sweet spot to be found - it's just a matter of deciding where to put it. It may be a bit of fiddling with some of these spots to find what sets your horse above the rest.

Stamina - Strength - Agility - Balance

So just like with the hunters/dressage/driven dressage, I want to determine which conformation traits will affect each stat related to cross country and decide which get used and which need to be ignored.

Stamina
Concave head
Longer face
Medium neck length
Low point of shoulder
Deep rib cage
Deep flank
Medium to short back

Strength
Convex head
Long face
Short neck
Sloped haunches
Long hip
Thick legs
Medium to short back
Uphill build

Agility
Concave head
Shorter face
Thick jowl
Medium neck length
Foreward set stifle
Medium to short back
Level croup

Balance
Convex head
Medium face length
Medium neck length
Flat haunches
Thick legs
Long back

Underlined points overlap in each stat and will be kept. Red points are contradicting points and will be set aside in favor of another.

Looking at our list, we can tell it may be challenging to keep balance up as we focus on increasing our other stats. But, if we also compare this to the lovely guide by Frost, Frost's Guide to Competition Success, we see this may not be too big of a concern.

Stamina 60
Strength 50
Agility 40
Balance 25

Stamina

First and foremost, we want to have great stamina for cross country. Overall, this is a relatively straightforward trait to increase - although I'm not certain I have found the top numbers for all of these areas yet, so if anyone has found something different, please share! The numbers I have found and shown below bring us up to 62 for stamina. I have left out back length for now and have a more depth discussion below.









Strength

So unlike the issues of strength in hunters/dressage/driven dressage, it seems a bit easier to pull up your strength conformation numbers following stamina. A few areas limit the amount of strength you can add if you want to maximize your stamina points, but a few of the bigger ticket areas can be worked with easily alongside stamina. Interestingly enough, you can easily manage to find at least a 53 in strength without too much issue.






Agility and Balance

Thus far much of the traits covered also fall into improving agility and balance at least a bit. Because these two stats don't have as much sway in cross country as stamina and strength, they don't require quite as much attention. These will kind of fall into place and slowly build themselves up as you work towards improving stamina and strength. Balance will just line up at 24 points from what we've already covered, and back length (to be discussed below) will bring it up a bit more even. Agility we can tweak still with the size of jowl and the stifle placement without sacrificing stamina or strength at all. Maximizing how we use the jowl and stifle location we can put our agility at 37:





Back Length

I've once again decided to give back length a spot of its own as what you choose to do here can greatly alter your outcome. We can choose to max out our stamina here, giving another 8 points to stamina, in a few different ways:




Both options give us the most stamina we can get. Option A also gives us a decent amount of strength and more agility than option B, but option B gives us a greater amount of balance. Regardless, balance would sit at a minimum of 28 here, which still aligns with Frost's findings for competitive genes.

Option A - Stamina, strength, agility
Stamina: 70
Strength: 59
Agility: 41
Balance: 28




Option B - Stamina & balance
Stamina: 70
Strength: 58
Agility: 38
Balance: 31

Or we have third decent option that still gives us lots of stamina, lots of strength and lots of agility, but not much balance:

Option C - Stamina, strength, agility
Stamina: 69
Strength: 60
Agility: 44
Balance: 25

In this case, you may get a slight edge working towards option C in your breeding and having a shorter back in your lines.

[mythirion]

Saddleseat

Saddleseat has proven to be relatively straightforward to go through. Having only three stats that you can alter with conformation maybe helps keep it simple. But with less to alter, this means it's even more important to find the right spot to maximize your stats.

Balance - Agility - Movement - Intelligence

Balance and agility also seem to be affected by less traits than some of the other stats, possibly making saddleseat a little less conformation based and more breeder's report based - though I have not yet explored this theory, so I could be wrong - unlike hunters which appears to greatly rely on conformation when studying scores. There also isn't a whole lot of overlap between traits and their stats, so more ways to add points to a stat without compromising others.

Balance
Convex head
Medium face length
Medium neck length
Flat haunches
Thick legs
Long back

Agility
Concave head
Shorter face
Thick jowl
Medium neck length
Foreward set stifle
Medium to short back
Level croup

Movement
Shallow jowl
Medium neck
Sloping shoulders
Low point of shoulder
Flat haunch
Back set stifle
Uphill build

Intelligence
NA

Underlined points overlap in each stat and will be kept. Red points are contradicting points and will be set aside in favor of another.

Balance

Balance doesn't take a lot of bring up, for the most part. If you can find the sweet spot or close to on even a few of these traits, your balance jumps up pretty fast - from what I can tell, you can get a maximum of 66 points for balance:









Agility





Face length is one area that has a bit more leeway in terms of balance, which is why I've put it on its own. But something to note is that the amount of agility may vary. In some disciplines, this won't matter or will matter very little - in saddleseat, this may make the difference between two comparable horses:





Movement





Final Notes

Balance: 66
Agility: 51
Movement: 40
Intelligence: NA