uma no bov-san's pretty derby

[notbov]

hello

hi

before getting into the monthly horse girl money extraction phone app post, I would like to address the 4 billion yen lawsuit brought against Cygames by Konami for patent infringement, which is speculated to be centered around the support character system used in the game (the deck of cards you play at a start of a campaign which cause events during a run, which is similar to a system present in Power Pro mobile games)

(Japanese residents or those paid in yen, please avert your eyes)

(the general sentiment: Konami might have a case, but also there’s absolutely no goodwill left over after the past decade or so of Konami being Konami, ignoring that the horses are the big nerd thing at the moment)

okay, so

this month marks the first League of Heroes, the new monthly PVP event for the horse girls. this is a playerbase-wide event, meaning that everyone - whale, dolphin, low spenders, free to plays, good, bad, smart, stupid - is in the same matchmaking bucket. Lord Cygames sets a single race for the whole of the event and it’s up to the trainer to make their best team and then everyone competes in ranked matchmaking, climbing up the tiers from bronze to platinum, with the top 96 teams getting highlighted in a set of races after the main event where everyone can gamblewagerbet choose who they think will win each race

so after getting the base details on the event and looking at the fact that 1. I do not spend Big Money on the horse girl money extraction phone app 2. I am lazy about actually curating a good breeding stock and 3. my pipeline is about adhering to a budget of 14,449 horse math points (we’re still not talking about horse math), I set myself a simple goal: I’m obviously not getting into the top 96 and I’m sure as hell not going to sneak into platinum, so I’m going to go for gold. any gold. even the lowest tier of gold. there are perverts out there and they are bloodthirsty, but certainly I can achieve even this feat.

The Setup: mid-length, Tokyo race course, 2400m, spring. the weather and track condition can vary from run to run (we’ll get to all the bits I figured out about the event in the heat of it later)

it’s time to get to work and build whatever I can out of desperation

also they let us name our teams (all 10 characters)

Team We Goof Up

Kitasan Black

“now hold on, I thought, from reading through this thread, that you try to use different horses as much as possible”

well, yes

but this isn’t regular Kitasan, this is New Years Shrine Visit Kitasan

“so what’s the difference”

…New Years Kita has a different outfit.

so the real difference is that, with regular Kita, she’s got a kit with foot in mid-length and a foot in long-length skills, whereas NY Kita’s kit is more focused on skills for her preferred tactic of outrun, with strong gold skills, a plus further amplified by the introduction of evolved skills (which you get for free*). also her unique skill is largely the same.

so, as you can imagine, New Kita immediately powercrept Old Kita.

now, I had a hunch that NY Kita was a meta horse, but, well, I would find out exactly how meta she was

(spoiler:EVERY GODDAMN WHALE)

Tokai Teio

my favorite (“favorite”) failson is back. I do not forgive her for not doing the things I needed her to do back at launch, but, well, of all the chase horses I tried making, she turned out the best so

it is with deep regret that I pick Teio as a member of the team

…which turned out to be funny as I would learn later that Teio is apparently the only other 3-star horse from launch to be meta (the second, from what I saw, being Maruzinsky)

well I guess I owed Teio this much after sticking her in my office to confuse anyone who sees her

Symboli Kris S

Gun.

Yes.

I like Kris. she’s a lot like me: brown, same name, heavy bags under her eyes, speaks random English

she summons a gun during the race

also responsible for showing me that hey, maybe whatever horses I throw into the meat grinder should probably have 8-900 stamina minimum, a discovery that paid dividends

okay, so how does the League really work?

so you start a run and get matched with 5 random teams around your ranking level. you race the other team’s horses along with 6 jobber AI horses. you score points based on how well your horses do each race, with the biggest score possible resulting from taking 1-2-3, with every position, from 1-12, giving less points until you hit 6th and below, where you just get the pity 10 points. so the max score you can get in any run is 1000 (200 points x 5 races) and the minimum is 150. also while you do have a limited amount of run per 24 hours and can bank up to 10, you don’t spend a ticket until you get out of bronze and into silver

now I’m sure some of you who design games or play too much ranked anything see issues with this:

1. there is a theoretical max score one can end up at
2. there is a floor everyone will achieve
3. if you are insane or just think about idiot game theory for a minute, you realize that you want to sandbag until you’re about to get out of bronze
4. you don’t ever derank, you just do not as good as you could have

well, I’m sure it won’t be that big a deal

anyway, the other big gimmick in the event is that, like regular daily PVP races, you can play items, but you’re limited to 3 of a type of item every 24 hours. which sadly means you can only play 3 carrot parfaits (maxes out your team’s motivation) for every 5 runs. but you want to use them strategically, because, well

okay, during runs, depending on how good your horses are doing, you fill a meter. when you fill that meter, you get a Hero Skill, a crazy strong active or passive skill that affects the whole team. some are like “hey your horses are insane if it’s raining” and others are “if your team uses more than 10 skills in a race, they run betterer”. some of these relate to the pre-race items you can use, like the passive that massively buffs your horses if they have max motivation. these are good for climbing and also they get used automatically so you have to cash them in.

but, well, you effectively don’t control when you get them unless you crush it every race, so it’s hard to claim that they’re strategically relevant. it’s more of a “I’m the lightrbinger, I’m the fucking universe” moment for a run

well, I was glad that runs in bronze were free because they let me figure out that Kita 1 was Bad Actually so we went back in to train a new one and Kita 2 was better. much better.

anyway, I’m sure I’ll still have problems getting to gold and

Day 2

shit. fuck. I did not see this coming.

so, I was doing just, you know, okay. but, uh, somehow I was high up enough that I was constantly getting matched with like, Big Money Horses, and

okay, for the most part, the rank of a horse doesn’t matter too much if the lower-ranked are built better, but eventually there comes a point where the raw skill and stat difference is too much to overcome, and it turns out that point is high Ultra G and low Ultra F

(yes the implication here is that there are Ultra A, S and SS ranks)

and the game just kept throwing me at these horses

live reaction of every time I queued for a run in the latter half of the event

but it’s not like shit didn’t happen, we occasionally speared us a whale

LOW MOTIVATION, 6-7000 POINTS UNDER, STILL WON

so I more or less ended up somewhere where I am not supposed to be, possibly by being good or dumb luck, while being in constant danger

Result

well I guess I have a benchmark to hit come July

also I got to look at all the teams what got in the top 96

turns out the meta is Kita, Kita, Kita, Bourbon, Bourbon, Kita, Neo Universe (you don’t know who this is), occasionally there’s a Teio or Christmas Oguri Cap, Ines Fujin, everyone run outrun

out of 24 races, I picked the winner on one

I chose, based on this intel, to not bet on the Preakness

well, at least we’ll be back to fighting dangerous horse minds next month

[notbov]

hi

hello

it’s the time of the month again wherein I commit a lot of words about the horse girl phone money extraction app (Marvelous Sunday is finally here in less than 24 hours!)

(no I’m talking about a horse, not the day)

this is the first cup of the new era of bimonth- semi-monthly(?) Champions Meeting, where they have sadly dumped the zodiac monikers for… the kind of race it is (dark horse lore I have not mentioned yet: the races the URA runs are called the Twinkle Star Series and all of the teams at Trancen are named after stars). so this is the MILE cup.

the setup: 1600m long, Tokyo race track, it’s raining, the turf is in questionable condition and it’s spring

I’m extra motivated for this because, after a brief moment of introspection, I realize that the last kind of race I haven’t won is a miler. which is a shame because I had a shitpost idea of a team ready to execute on but instead I decided to try, much to my dismay

Team MILE

Daitaku Helios

of course I had to make sure to target pull for Helios, we gotta make sure Palmer has her number one bro in the world at the ready. Helios is an outrun horse almost entirely focused on milers, though with her attribute spread you could probably breed her for anything. she also has access to Big Escape through an event, but, well, actually taking it costs quite a bit of horse budget (I continue to stonewall about horse math) better used for more skills.

more importantly, she’s not there to win, she’s there to help shutdown other outrun horses and, anecdotally, running big escape doesn’t get you out far enough to not get overtaken unless the planets align

Helios is just here to party

also for some reason she’s a part of the gal clique, a thing she has somehow dragged her buddy Palmer into

just gals hangin’ out being gals

Nishino Flower

“hey you’re doing it again”

okay, look, give me a second to explain

June is the hallowed time of Japanese gacha games where they can trot out bridal variants and skins of their characters and the horses are no exception.

the 2023 June Bride Event feat. The Guy At Cygames Who Knows English

well, this year, the bridal horses were Nishino Flower (you know her) and Hishi Amazon, whom I support on the basis that she’s brown and I must boost all brown characters

well, we gotta pull for her and

pictured: a lucky idiot

okay so I got Bridal Nishino Flower and I am absolutely livid about this, how dare the random number generator not give me what I want when I gamble

so I completely ignore horse until I am deep into prep when I randomly check her kit and

to quickly explain: she has the speed boost for miler corners (マイルコーナー) in her kit. she also has the gold version of said skill, which means she can evolve it

the evolved version of this skill, when it fires off, also gives a speed boost to the other two horses on the team

I immediately dumpster any other ideas I have for the chase spot and make sure this horse is on the team

she is not here to win, she is here to make the team win

so really, she’s just as fucked up as her regular variant, except before, it was localized to herself, whereas now she makes the whole team fucked up

King Halo

I am getting so much mileage out of this cap, you have no idea

“okay we’re doing this again, what bullshit made-up variation of this horse is this”

okay this is ouendan King Halo from last year’s spring/sports festival, wherein she has convinced a bunch of horses to be cheerleaders in a plot to embarrass them but also she worked her work too hard and became a mark

this is because she is stupid

the main difference between this and her regular version is that whereas the regular version has an extremely finicky unique skill that’s more or less useless on races longer than a mile, ouendan Halo gets an extremely finicky acceleration unique that fires off going into the last section of the race, which can make her contest violently from all the way in the back if it fires off

she also has a gold passive for races that take place during the spring in her kit. which means she gets an evolved version of it, one that specifically buffs speed and power. it means we can build a big stat line, take the passive, evolve it and effectively have over 1200 power to get the power boost as long as she rolls at least normal motivation (so, 75% of the time, in theory).

so it turns out this dumb idea I had was good actually

okay do you see that

now imagine it happening 34 more times

King Halo

had 35 wins

by herself

she actually almost had a 50% win rate

she had more wins than every other horse I used combined

this is probably hard to visualize, so I have made this useful chart of wins for you to peruse:

so the first two rounds were pretty uneventful, because one member of my roster was doing all of the heavy lifting and when she decided to not function, the others were good enough to keep things competitive. we ended the group stages with a nice, round 60 wins out of 80 races, or a 75% win rate

I’m going into the finals, I’m feeling positive, I’m optimistic, and also for all intents and purposes, the outcome of King Halo winning is almost literally a coin flip

b-but, the numbers…

so, once again, Nishino Flower, the fucked up horse meant to support her teammates, she just

Halo didn’t even get 2nd

what, I took all of the top three? who cares, it wasn’t supposed to be like this, it was Halo’s time

I’m very conflicted about this win, numbers aren’t supposed to lie

stay tuned for next time, wherein my faith in the certainty of statistics is further eroded

[username]

I started reading All The Pretty Horses for the first time this week after the death of Cormac McCarthy… and I think I get all this much more now.

“What he loved in horses was what he loved in men, the blood and the heat of the blood that ran them."

[notbov]

I’m vaguely alarmed by the relationship posters have given Cormac McCarthy to this thread but I’m not going to stop it either

[notbov]

hi

hello

happy 2.5th anniversary

https://twitter.com/netkeiba/status/1694424516540408200

as you can see, 30 months in, Lord Cygames cannot shovel all the money they’re making into the furnace fast enough

the money spigot isn’t going to stop either, considering Narita Top Road, star of YouTube cartoon show Road to the Top is on rate up right now, season 3 of the anime got announced for airing in October and the mainland Chinese version goes live at the end of the month (this is on top of the Korean and Taiwanese versions celebrating their own first anniversaries)

also they did the ritual battery of semi-annual balance changes and a new campaign, where the horses try to overcome the greatest obstacle facing all Japanese horse girls: French

that’s not important now though

what’s important is that there’s two months of horse girl phone app shitposting to get done

July

July was a League of Heroes month. as you may recall, League is the mode to make whales feel better about the money they spent on the game and no sane, reasonable person should engage in it

…so anyway, this League race was a sprint race, which meant that you could do just the most absolutely deranged, headass shit because your horse is only running for a minute and needs to be as fast as possible. honestly, sprints are kind of in a weird position, the same one occupied by dirt, where there’s not a whole lot of horses specifically for sprints, so you tend to see the same horses a bunch and also god help you if you don’t have enough for a full team

but I do, because I’m an idiot who’s been playing since launch

Maruzinsky

Supercar Maruzinsky, a horse whose joke is they drive and probably belongs to the group of students at Trancen who are probably too old to legally be attending the school but who cares. she is a questionable influence on her juniors (the first swimsuit event was about her taking Spe and some friends to Bubbleland, a theme park celebrating 80s bubble economy Japan, which, if I can drop keyfabe for a moment, I think is kind of a fucked up joke) but she’s also good friends with eternal school council president Symboli Rudolf so she’s probably a good person. probably.

so this is launch Maruzinsky and not Swimsuit Maruzinsky because my repeated attempts to gamble for her alt have failed so far, but that’s okay because regular Maruzinsky is… okay? she’s not terrible? her unique often gets target bred to better horses, so she’s got that. here, in my awful team, she’s not winning much but she is holding down the fort in the front most of the time so even if her numbers are objectively bad, she’s doing work. of some kind. mostly she’s here to have a good time

also I had her as my main screen horse for a while, but that’s just because we’re birthday buddies

Nishino Flower

okay you guys already know, she’s a fucked up horse and the main thing here is the limiters are off to make her as fucked up as possible

this is going to come as a shock but she was pretty fucked up

Taiki Shuttle

it’s everyone’s favorite Texan cow-horse girl from Kentucky. except this time, it’s her summer vacation alt from last year. so, I like regular Shuttle but I find her… inconsistent? a lot of her power for the last spurt is tied up in her unique and, well, it can literally not fire off if she’s doing too good. so, Bubblegum Memories Shuttle trades a giant acceleration button for a big boost for the last straightaway and instead gets 鍔迫り合い in her kit, the gold chase acceleration skill for the last corner. of course, since she has that in her kit, she also gets the evolved version.

otherwise, Bubblegum and regular Shuttle are pretty similar. in fact, their kits are so similar that I’m not entirely sure why I jumped at the opportunity to level her up and traIS THAT A BRAID

anyway, very happy to welcome her on the team

okay, so, Cygames perhaps realized a few things, things I had pointed out the last time I wrote about this accursed event. for one, you know automatically have your score capped out when ascending from bronze to silver so now the ceiling is slightly lower, presumably to stop people from sandbagging. also, platinum, the highest rankings, now gets its own tiers like the other rankings, instead of everyone over 20k points being in a giant death pool called “platinum”

also either one of two things happened: either they adjusted the matchmaking to be more… fair is probably the best word, or the part of the playerbase that doesn’t have knives out for their fellow trainers at all times didn’t show up because I was immediately launched into teams of big money horses from the get go.

anyway, it was okay because Flower was fucked up

(I think she eventually dropped under 50% but hey, good job all things considered)

so anyway we met the dubious benchmark of “doing as good as last time”

I’m happy for this number because it’s never going to be this high again, especially with next month being the first long league challenge

well I’m sure it’ll go fine

(it won’t)

August

okay, we’re back out to greener pastures, to fighting pervert minds with down to earth horses. the only thing that could ruin it is if it was a dirt cup and

fuck, shit.

the setup: it’s a 1600m miler race at Funabashi. the sun’s out, the dirt is good and also the track is dirt

Smart Falcon

the first post-launch dirt horse, founding member of the Getaway Sisters and number one umadol, Smart Falcon is usually a sign that the trainer knows what they’re doing because her story is basically begging you to breed turf ability into her so you actually end up seeing her a lot in turf cups. but she’s actually a dirt horse. she’s loud, she’s fast, she runs out in front and she’s kind of obnoxious. and yet, somehow, at the position I tend to make the worst horses at (outrun), she has the most wins of the team, probably because of all the times she would just explode out of the last corner and dare everyone else to catch up

also she’s an SM58 appreciator and I can respect that

Copano Rickey

hey did you know her name was Copano and not Cobano? you would have to be an idiot to mess that up and then also never correct it

this time Rickey gets to retire from the position of “Substitute Smart Falcon” and relinquish it to Actual Smart Falcon and hang back in her slightly preferred position of chase. which is great, except for the part where Daiwa Scarlet didn’t want to be good friends with her during her run so instead of 鍔迫り合い to help her contest at the end of the race, I have to desperately add the dance event Sakura Chiyono-O’s (you don’t know who this is) unique, which is an acceleration skill that procs if she does good. so we know when she’s doing good because she tends to win. in fact, even with the least amount of runs among the core horses used, she equaled the wins of another member, but we’re not talking about her yet.

Taiki Shuttle

making her second appearance in this shitpost, Bubblegum Memories Shuttle impressed me so much that I just made a beeline to her and trained her up. she mostly didn’t disappoint

Haru Urara

okay you’ve probably already heard of Haru. Haru is famous in Japan for running one-hundred and thirteen races without a single win at a local (which is, to say, not JRA) level. there is no denying it, Haru, despite trying so hard, was probably bad. but everyone loves her (she’s still alive)

so Haru the horse girl is like that. she’s kind of bad? her regular version is meh and her New Years alt is okay-ish? but she doesn’t let that get her down. she’s always busy vibing or being happy. only positive vibes with her.

anyway, Haru did bad; even though she opened the cup with three straight wins, she only managed to get to 10. which Rickey tied in half as many races. the one thing I did notice was that every time she could manage to find the outside, she would just blow past the entire pack, in no small part due to 電光石火, an acceleration skill for sprints and milers, and Ouendan King Halo’s unique, which is also a big acceleration skill (also Haru and Halo are roommates). I was intrigued but also I want to win, so.

“okay now hold on a second. you listed four horses, but you only get to run three on track!”

so those four were the core of the team, but when it came time to pick the three that would race in the finals, I had a dilemma. I could easily run Falcon/Shuttle/Rickey and smash the three winningest horses I have onto a team and go straight for a win.

or I could put Haru in for the culture, because the idea of her winning is funny.

well, I do like winning, so the choice was obvious.

so the race goes pretty normally, everyone is just doing their job: Falcon got out in front and stayed there, Rickey contested up front and Haru was vibing in the back. so we get to the last corner, where pretty much everything happens. everyone starts pressing buttons and, uh

uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh?

am I crying?

Haru…

so anyway, I bagged a win by gambling on a loser. I will learn nothing from this other than proclaiming one simple fact: I love gambling.

anyway, stay tuned for whenever I decide to poke at the new campaign and join in on learning French

credit: https://twitter.com/randall_kznr/status/1693998027416260900

(I am deeply invested in learning if “horse girl/ウマ娘” gets translated into French on screen and how they decide to translate it)

[Broco]

mademoiselle équine

[notbov]

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

[Brooks]

someone at the meet informed me these are all based on actual horses and you can imagine my alarm

[notbov]

the game itself features a handful of fictional horses but they’re usually campaign-exclusive horses and likely have basis in real animals

except for Bitter Glace, who escaped the game and now there’s a real horse in Japan named Bitter Glace

[notbov]

like if I were to post an image of this random Super Famicom horse game, you would see several horses I’ve mentioned in this thread if you can read names

[Victor]

legendary thoroughbreds

[notbov]

note:

@notbov

Bitter Glace

Cygames umapedia url for Bitter actually romanizes her name as “Bitter Glasse”, which, as far as I can tell, “glasse” is not a word in any language, where as “glace” is French for… a number of things but can be used for “ice cream”.

I’m using my authority as an ice cream liker to rename her so

[SUPERSONNICK]

So hey, youtube recommendations.

MxTx (ぱかグラインド)

Guess where i would NEVER have expected to see notbov’s × moi’s interest intersect outside of AMD hardware foolishness, but here we ar— ahem, i am.

Truly

[notbov]