Derby Owners Club · Rev C · Breeding Meta
The Perfect
Stable
Ten pairings, reverse-engineered from the game's own decoded math, built to beat every variable Derby Owners Club throws at you — each leg type, each distance, both surfaces. Not the highest stat line. The right horse for every race on the card.
Roster swept: 366 horses
33,264 pairings evaluated
Model: byte-exact foal engine
Surfaces: 26 turf / 10 dirt
First, how the game actually runs
A six-phase machine?
The long-held player model says a race is a fixed sequence of six phases, one external stat each, and the "perfect" horse depends on which phases its style commits to. The strip below draws that model.
Checked: not six phases. The six-phase picture is the old player model. World Edition's race code (Rev C, spot-checked in Rev D, read twice independently) has no phase per external: each external works in its own situation, and several can be active at once. Start at the gate and in the opening seconds; Corner in the turns; Out of the Box any time you whip with three or more horses close; Competing (with two or more horses close, never while leading) and Tenacious (while the gauge is nearly full) in the last part of the race, from 500 to 1300 metres out depending on distance and running style; Spurt in the final stretch (the last 280 metres, 430 from 2000 metres up), only while you whip. The closest thing to phases is the pace plan: every race is split into 8 sections, and the running style raises or lowers the speed the horse aims for section by section, by more than most single externals add. The three cards under the strip give what speed, stamina and sharp actually do in the code. How much each piece changes results hasn't been measured at a cabinet.
01
Start
Jump out of the gate, early acceleration
02
Corner
The first turn — holding line and position
03
Out‑of‑Box
Breaking clear of the early bunch
04
Competing
Sustained mid-race cruising and jockeying
05
Tenacious
The late-middle grind — holding on / fighting
06
Spurt
The closing kick to the wire
GATEWIRE
Stamina ST · birth cap 45
Sets how fast the gauge fills while you whip: higher stamina lets you urge longer before the horse has to ease off.
Speed SP · birth cap 45
Adds a little to the top speed the horse aims for while you whip (noticeably more from 50 up, less at 3000 and 3200 metres).
Sharp SH · birth cap 45
Meant to set how quickly a horse picks up speed, but a programming slip gives every horse the same value: no race effect of its own in World Edition. It still counts toward the three-stat total, which adds a little speed.
The lever nobody optimizes
Leg type ↔ its phases
Running style isn't power: across the CPU racers the external total is flat (about 220) for every style. The style is set by where Start ranks among Start, Out of the Box, Competing, Tenacious and Spurt (Corner is ignored for the rank, and a tie counts for Start): 1st Front-runner, 2nd Start dash, 3rd Last spurt, 4th or 5th Stretch-runner. In World Edition's code, style picks a section-by-section pace plan across the race's 8 sections (read twice independently; how much it changes results hasn't been measured). The per-style wish lists below are the old player model: the code says when each external works (see above), but nobody has measured which build wins for a style, so treat them as tradition.
Front-runner 逃げ
Start ▲Corner ▲Tenacious ▲
Leads from the gate and refuses to come back. Wants early phases plus the tenacity to hold the lead to the wire.
Start dash 先行
Start ▲Corner ▲Out-of-Box ▲
Sits just off the pace in the first flight, then pounces. Early position with a real spurt in reserve.
Last spurt 差し
Competing ▲Tenacious ▲Spurt ▲
Travels midpack, ranges up through the field. Lives in the mid-to-late phases and finishes hard.
Stretch-runner 追込
Spurt ▲▲Competing ▲Out-of-Box ▲
Sits dead last, then unloads. Needs a devastating final kick and the traffic-craft to use it. Start has to stay low (4th or 5th of the five style externals).
Almighty 自在
All six equal
All six current externals exactly equal, Corner included (five equal and a different Corner is a Front-runner). Extremely rare: it depends on the current externals, so you level a horse toward it with training; breeding can only set up the shape. The balanced slots below are shapes to level toward it.
The ten to seek
The perfect stable
Each slot is our pick for one job (its leg type, distance band and surface), scored with our own race model. Gold bars mark the externals the old player model says that style wants.
Which surface wins the game
Turf runs the show — dirt is a specialist
Turf
26 courses · ~17 G1
72% of the calendar · ~90% of the majors
Where nearly all the prestige lives. Turf lines also max higher — a true 45/45/45 is reachable on grass. Your flagship belongs here.
Dirt
10 courses · 2 G1
Super Dirt GP · Japan Cup Dirt
A required niche, not the main event. Dirt lines cap around ~121 internals — strong, but they can't reach the turf ceiling, and you can't win the dirt majors without one.
Verdict: Turf is the better primary on every axis — bigger calendar, almost all the G1s, and a higher stat ceiling. But a complete stable carries one dirt specialist for those two majors and the ten dirt courses. And because a soft/muddy turf shifts toward dirt behavior, don't breed your all-weather runners' dirt to zero — keep the insurance (that's slot 10).
How the flagship gets to perfect
The 45/45/45 lock
Breed toward the pattern, not the stat
Bred at birth stats, averaging drags one stat down and walls out at about 45/43/45; at that point the pair-match (pedigree) bonus is what tops off the last points: when sire and dam share high/low aptitudes, the foal gets up to +3 ST / +2 SP / +3 SH.
Note: this table breeds each generation at its birth stats. In the game a foal starts from its parents' current internals, so racing both parents up to 50 or more on all three gives 45/45/45 directly, pedigree bonus or not; just avoid a parent average of 46 to 49, which gives only 41 to 44.
City Commandant is the key — its extreme alternating aptitudes [15,1,15,1,15,1] are a pedigree magnet. Commit to it as the stud and the line converges to that pattern, the bonus climbs to the full c=6, and it caps a perfect horse.
| Gen | ST / SP / SH | Match |
|---|
| 1 | 37 / 40 / 40 | c=0 |
| 2 | 38 / 42 / 40 | c=0 |
| 3 | 39 / 43 / 40 | c=3 |
| 4 | 42 / 45 / 43 | c=6 |
| 5 | 44 / 45 / 44 | c=6 |
| 6 | 45 / 45 / 45 | LOCK |
Byte-verified
The foal engine, the pedigree bonus, and every stat in the roster are decoded from the ROM and corroborated against real cards. The six-phase model is not: it is the old player model, and the race code shows no such phases. Leg types on the cards are estimates from breeding bands; a real horse's style follows its current externals. By the game's rule on their bands, the three balanced slots (1, 7 and 10) would run as Front-runner, Start dash and Stretch-runner.
Scored with our race model
The slot picks were scored with our race model, which used a surface curve later found to be keyed to the internals sum and an externals-vs-internals balance that rests on one tuning constant, so treat the ranking as a starting point.
Modeled, not measured
The exact dirt-aptitude curve (how much a point is worth on dirt) and the per-race going table aren't fully cracked yet — so "255 vs 208 dirt" is a confident direction, not a measured delta.
Track condition
Muddy-turf-runs-like-dirt is a player report; how much the going changes a race result is not verified yet. Treat dirt aptitude on turf horses as weather insurance.
DOC