bonjour
salut
it’s time for a distinctly French-tinged horse girl phone game shitpost
a lot has happened since the 2.5th anniversary in August. we got a new campaign to create even more fucked up horses, the first League of Heroes to take place on a long track, a special cup taking place at newly added track Longchamp (the only foreign track in the game so far)
oh, and I guess season 3 of the cartoon started
(this apparently isn’t even anywhere near as dank as some of the other real life references; click through on https://twitter.com/AH77915382/status/1709605080327188612 for a danker callback)
so first up is the new campaign. in the new campaign, some little shitgoblin named Mei gets Trancen hyped up over the fact that Japanese horse girls can’t win in France to get the student body fired up to win the Prix de l’Arc de Triomphe (note: the scenario of the campaign ignores that, of the current roster of existing horse girls, that the namesakes of Taiki Shuttle and Seeking the Pearl (you don’t know who this is) won races in France, a fact that potentially posits Taiki Shuttle as canonically the most powerful horse girl). so now, with the power of friendly rivalries and impossibly advanced virtual reality (first introduced in the VRMMO event where Gold Ship takes over the virtual kingdom and El Condor Pasa and Grass Wonder have to save the day), you train to not embarrass yourself in Paris.
this is most like Make a New Track, in that 1. it’s a free scenario, so it doesn’t follow the stories laid out for each horse girl and 2. massive stat inflation. the loop is you press buttons to train with your friends and when your friends get pumped up enough, you can cash in with a special training option where you race them and get bonuses for every race you win and sometimes, this SS training race becomes an SSS training race and you get big bonuses. you also get points to improve your ability to race on foreign tracks, which essentially translate into training bonuses and also removes the debuffs you get for racing at Longchamp, a thing you will quickly learn about because they make you do Virtual Races there against your rivals and also the actually good horses of France to make sure you’re progressing.
then, instead of the normal summer training camp, which is sort of the bonus time of the other campaigns, you and the campaign story horses go to Paris to do a summer of intensive training before going to qualify for the race at Longchamp. you do things like eat baguettes, kayak and work on your French
editor’s note: this is correctly conjugated
so then one of two things happen: you enter the Prix and lose miserably because the game timegates the foreign track skill that removes the debuff on your speed stat and you go back home and train hard for round 2, or you enter the Prix and because you know what’s coming, you have massively overbuilt on speed and also used continues to shift into a timeline wherein things go your way and you win and are then launched into Title Defense mode, which is like the first outcome except for the part where you’re a fucking winner and also activates a harder boss horse to join the second Prix.
except because of the shortened nature of the campaign (it ends after the second trip to Paris, effectively cutting out around 8-12 turns compared to other campaigns) and the fact that We Absolutely Have To Sell The New Support Card, the stat inflation is huge. massive. perhaps even pornographic. odds are good if you can win at Longchamp on the first go around, you will absolutely fucking crush it the second go around. which gets you even more bonuses at the end. the rich get richer!
so this is it. the end of horse racing. even someone stupid like me can produce Good Horse with little effort.
anyway, it’s a good thing they didn’t introduce a brand new meta-defining method of training horse girls right before the next League of Heroes an-
Septembre
so, on top of horses now being more fucked up than ever and the running League being on a long track, I, uh, forgot it was happening until two days out
well I’m sure I can manage something, right?
Mejiro Palmer
so Palmer is the horse I figured out the L’Arc campaign out with, which means she’s also now the highest ranking horse on my account. which I’m fine with. as a bonus, because L’Arc doesn’t let horse story events occur, it means she can’t get Big Escape, which, while funny, doesn’t do much for me on a 3000m track and also saves me the temptation of wasting valuable skill points for not much return on the track or in terms of score (you know what, I dare you, ask me about horse math, I’m ready to suffer). with that said, she’s still doing the outrun thing and even with a somewhat-elevated stamina stat, my thinking is she’s not going to win a lot but instead will hold the line for good teammates. which I have to train. so she might be doomed.
Mister CB
CB is back to make up for losing a cup final at the finish line. she’s a strong candidate for both L’Arc and this League, having skills mostly for her tactic or split medium/long length, along with her kit giving an extremely strong finish.
apparently her namesake was active in the 80s, and not the 70s like I thought because for some reason I looked at her and thought “Farrah Fawcett?”. I might be stupid. or blind. or both.
she’s still wearing a hat.
Symboli Kris S
I like the brown gun horse that has my name and likes barbecue. also I guess her kit is built for long races too.
so this went okay, despite the whole “long race” and “new meta-destroying horse training campaign” things. matchmaking seemed fine (by which I mean it was only slightly merciless instead of completely merciless). I noticed CB outperformed the rest of the team in silver and low gold, but getting into mid-gold and platinum, somehow Palmer turned on and quickly overtook CB’s winrate. also I got bad brain in platinum and decided that Kris, the lowest ranked horse, should be replaced and the combination of matchmaking, the replacement horses probably being worse and RNG made the winrate go down, so I stuck her back in and the team worked better again? man, I dunno, fuckin’ horses.
I guess things went okay considering I skipped a day and basically missed a day’s worth of items. consistency is good, I suppose.
Octobre
okay, it’s time to get back down to earth. instead of competing against sick perverted horse minds with investment (note: does not exclusively or necessarily refer to money spent), we’re instead competing against sick perverted horse minds with their horse calculators nearby. the Champion’s Meeting CLASSIC.
the race is in lovely Paris, at the Hippodrome de Longchamp, located in the 16th arrondissement, about 2km west of the actual Arc. the race itself is 2400m long, the longest a medium length race can be, it’s autumn and it’s raining.
the raining part is important later.
Tokai Teio
yeah it’s fucking Teio again. I used the knowledge of her evolved cornering skill having a bonus acceleration effect and not taking up a bunch of rank budget to train a horse that would subsist mostly having so many goddamn skills that hopefully she’ll press the right amount of buttons in the correct order to win. it mostly worked! she did pretty well.
I still hate her.
Symboli Kris S
so it’s Kris again, except it’s Halloween Kris, acquired through the power of looking at the gacha screen, muttering “it doesn’t matter, nothing matters” and doing a single pull. so she’s a Frankenstein’s monster here, and I mean she’s gone full Karloff because she’s racing in platform stompers
the main reason I would put myself into debt trying to get her in the roster is that her kit contains the gold version of the medium length corner speed boost, which means she can evolve it, into Burn Down, whose bonus effect is it gives the whole team a speed boost on activation. this is important later (again).
Gold Ship
“gee Golshi, why does Cygames let you have two alts?”
it wasn’t enough that regular Gold Ship was one of the best launch and non 3-star horses and swimsuit Gold Ship has a silly unique skill, now Paris Fashion Week Gold Ship comes in with some idiotic, gimmicky bullshit made to recreate the experience of racing Gold Ship (horse). her unique is fairly standard: it’s a speed boost that fires off going into the last corner. the bullshit is, the boost gains a heap of extra power if she gets a late start.
“hey that seems really stupid, how would you train around that?”
in her kit is the gold version of the passive that makes the horse race better if the track condition is anything other than “good”. if we evolve DEMON OF BAD TURF, it gains an interesting downside to the increase of the stat boost: she now gets a late start every race. instead of relying on the 15-20% chance of getting a late start, instead, she gets out of the gate late every race.
we build around the passive. go big into stats. we make sure to grab the other gold skill in her kit, an acceleration for the final straightaway. her skill sheet looks a bit anemic, but Kris is there to help out.
okay, so I had Kris in there, but in the act of 1. actually reading skill descriptions and 2. the power of observation, I figure out that she needs to be further up in the pack
minor digression: okay so the game has a fan translation patch and one of the options is to “expose skill data”
here is an example
so effectively if all skills have conditions like this, it’s just about working out where we need to be, percentage wise, in a field of 9 horses
no I do not play with the patch, that’s cheating
so anyways, I had Kris originally trained for the mid-rear tactic, like her original flavor is made for, but after getting mad that she wasn’t burning enough things down, I remake her as chase to better position her and get more consistent procs. it worked. I am smart sometimes.
and now let’s talk about the track itself for a hot second. Longchamp is unique in terms of tracks in the game in that, the last corner is super early and the final straightaway is fully one-third of the tracks length. this is also approximately where the third split for skills is. horses built to overtake or contest in the final spurt are strong. outrun horses are fucking being murdered. a certain brand new skill from a brand new card is Big Meta.
(quick explainer: the power of the acceleration effect of 王手 is based on how far the horse is away from the goal when it fires off. this is usually at the 800m mark at Longchamp. it’s strong.
also all the horses who used it lost to Gold Ship.)
okay so we have somehow taken all the random shit into consideration and figured out a working team. round 1 goes fine, round 2 in group A goes fine.
doing okay
finals time.
somehow the field is such that there are no outrun horses (which, fair) and, while I’ve seen this a number of times, instead of Kris taking charge and then staying there the whole race, Teio gets out in front. this will kill Teio.
the race goes pretty normally otherwise, until it’s time to live GOLD
also featured: Gold Ship has added “command grab” into her mix
Golshi won, Teio died
all is right in the world