Equestrian Centre - boxes needed for max lesson gains

We often get asked how many boxes you need to achieve maximum lesson gains for your EC. This has always been a tricky one to answer because so many factors affect how well your EC ranks. Obviously you need to have excellent meadows, competitions, mashes, carrots and stables, with the largest boxes as well as horses with high dressage skills and the right number of employees.

However, a key factor has always been the number of boxes your EC needs in order for you to achieve high lesson gains, with a 60 equus price. Well the moderator Zepharo has today confirmed that players need just 20 boxes to achieve this.

Now be careful with this statement. If you just buy 20 boxes, you won't achieve a high lesson gain and high prestige. You need all of the other elements in your equestrian centre to be at the right level too. So for example having horses with 350 in dressage will not result in a high prestige EC.

This confirmation from Howrse does help those of you who are starting out and need to have some sort of guideline regarding box numbers. So good luck with your EC and remember to rotate your fields so you always have 100% fertitlity.

Good luck,

Patsy

Updates to Equestrian Centres

Howrse have today (August 30th 2011) announced some small changes to the way Equestrian Centres run.

They have increased the wages (which is good news for employees, maybe less so for employers!) on all Equestrain Centre jobs. The game will have automatically changed your current employee salaries to match the new maximums and minimums.

You can now also set the maximum length of boarding in your Equestrian Centre. Simply go to the boarding tab in your EC office. You can set it anywhere between 5 and 30 days. This is great if you want to stop players leaving their lower skilled or ill horses in your EC for a long time.

Howrse have also introduced some new animations that you can add to your horses page for free. The range now includes balloons, fireworks and lightning (all quite scary for horses!).

Lucy

EC shower coming to Howrse?

We've noticed that on several non-international sites such as UK Howrse, you can now buy a shower (see the picture) for your boxes in equestrian centres. Bizarre but true. Howrse describes the shower like this:

The shower is equipment for boxes in equestrian centres.It allows horses boarded in the box to spend 10% less energy on actions. That's why it's in such high demand among horse breeders and an asset to your centre!

It's an interesting new item and one that would definitely be a boost for breeders. On the UK site today (5th April) showers are priced at 19,900 equus. However, it is the same as the price for boxes and meadows in that the price fluctuates. So expect the price to increase if and when it comes to the international version of the game. We'd be surprised if it didn't come to the 'main' game but you never know.

So will we soon be rushing off to buy showers for our EC's? Maybe next, we'll be buying jacuzzi's and saunas too!

Patsy

UPDATE: Ow has confirmed that the showers will be coming to the international site soon.

Health Mashes in your EC

Right, so you've grown your cash crops and built up a good reserve of equus for your brand new EC.

So, what should you do next?

Well the next best thing to do is start growing all the things you'll need to make health mashes with. Health mashes add prestige to your EC and a lot of people look for them when choosing where to board their horse.

To make health mashes you'll need to grow:

Apples
Carrots
Wheat
Flax
Barley
Oats

Phew, it's quite a bit isn't it?

At this stage buy a greenhouse with the money you've raised (as then you can grow crops all year round which is invaluable for a new EC). Also, try to buy 15 acre fields and, if at all possible, scarecrows (if you can't afford these right now, or you can't/don't want to spend passes, don't worry - you can do it without!)

Always use manure as fertiliser - this shortens the time it takes for the crops to grow. And, if you do have the use of scarecrows - these mean you get twice as much harvest from the same field.

You'll only ever need to plant one crop of apples as the same field will give you a continous supply. You harvest them on the 1st day of each month.

You need to grow lots of carrots, as these are also available to boarders to give to their horses. Keep your supply topped up to ensure you don't run out. To get maximum prestige you need at least 30 carrots for every box you have.

Once you've grown and harvested all your ingredients go to your EC, click on Meadows and then click on produce mash. Choose health mashes and make as many as you can. For health mashes you need at least 10 for every box you have. But you can never have too many!

While all this is going on, you can start to get your EC competitions running. More about that in the next post.

Lucy

Growing Crops in your EC

Absolutely the first thing you should do when you get an EC is grow crops!

Don't spend your money on boxes, bedding, pets, staff or anything else - use it to buy fields, seeds and manure. This may sound weird but there is method in this madness...

Crops = cash!

Spend the first few weeks that you own your EC growing and harvesting crops to build up your equus reserve. Then, once you have a good amount of money, you can start to buy the boxes and employ the staff that you'll need. And you'll be able to afford much better quality. Which means your EC will get off to a flying start.

The seasons that you can plant crops (and how long they take to grow are shown below):

Carrot seeds - spring - 9 days
Wheat seeds - summer - 9 days
Barley seeds - spring - 10 days
Oat seeds - spring - 11 days
Turnip seeds - summer - 7 days
Pass seeds - autumn - 30 days
Apple seeds - autumn - A harvest every Fall
Flax seeds - spring - 8 days

The best things to grow are Flax in the spring and Turnips in the summer - these will bring in the most money when you sell them back to the store.

We'll explain about the other crops that you'll need to grow in a future post.

So it is true - sometimes money does grow on trees (well on crops anyway!)

Lucy