The Advantages of a SIMperior Subscription

Original article written by Regina Moore posted 12 years 2 weeks ago

With Game Point and a Half Day coming up next month, attention deserves to be given to a special advantage that can be purchased with game points. This would be a subscription to SIMperior.

From the SIMStore heading on the stable office menu list, one can click on Game Points, and from there click on “Upgrade to SIMperior Membership” to see what such a membership entails. But a mere listing is difficult to appreciate without really understanding what each of those items gets you.

So, here’s a more thorough breakdown of the perks you get from being a SIMperior member.


HORSE TYPE
Being able to select a horse’s type is a tremendous advantage to players with larger stables. The horse type is available on each horse’s page, and also in the player’s various barns.

So, say you have a dirt sprinter. By setting the type to Dirt Sprinter, when you go to enter that horse in races, only dirt sprint races will show up. That’s so much easier than slogging through many, many dozens of races that isn’t at all suited to the horse, because they’re the wrong distance or surface.

Or, say a player announces that Horse X has been retired to stud. You really like Horse X and he’s a turf router. If you’ve set the type on all your broodmares, you can filter your breeding barn so that only turf route broodmares are listed, and from there you can get serious about which one(s) you want to breed to Horse X.

Or say you have a lot of yearlings, and you want to work them for equipment, but there’s too many to train all at once. So, on Mondays you’ll work your dirt sprinters, on Tuesdays your turf sprinters, etc. If each horse’s type is set, you can filter the training barn by that type, and work from a much shorter list each day, rather than having to pick and choose which horses to train from the entire barn.


AUTO SHIPPING
Ever been frustrated that you entered your horse in a race that’s ideal for it, only to discover on race day that it’s been scratched, because you forgot to ship it to the track? That never happens with Auto Shipping! This feature allows you to set your profile so that your horses always ship X days (you choose the number) before race day. If, for example, you want to ship a horse extra early because it’s going an unusually long distance, you can manually ship it earlier, and that won’t interfere with the auto shipping for the other horses.


SPEED FIGURES
I’m not sure how players play competently without speed figures. Take two horses that each won their debut by three lengths. At first glance, they might appear to be of equal ability. But if one horse only needed to run a 62 figure to win, and the other ran a 72, then that says a whole lot about the quality of each of those fields. The figures can be even more important for horses that got beat in a race, because the speed figure gives a sense of relativity in terms of how close the horse actually was to the winner. It’s one thing to get beat a half length and run a 66 against the winner’s 67 figure, and another to get beat a half length and only have a 64 figure, compared to the winner’s 67.

Also note that The Steward has been firm that SIM does *not* use the common real-life scale of a length being equal to 1/5 of a second. So, you can’t use beaten lengths, relative to the winning time, to accurately figure out how fast a beaten horse ran in a particular race. You need the speed figure to tell you that.


STUD BOOK
The Stud Book is packed with information. The contents are divided by stallion type (turf router, Paint sprinter, etc). From there, you get a listing of all horses that have been set at that type by their owners. Each listing can be sorted by Earnings, Stud Fee, Location, etc.

Once clicking on a particular stallion’s page, you can see stats on: total progency earnings, numbers of foals, total wins from foals, total runners, total winners, percentage of winners from runners, average earnings per runner, total stakes winners, and percent of stakes winners. In addition, the page lists the stallion’s top ten earners and the maternal grandsire for each, so you can immediately see which bloodlines the stallion has most successfully crossed with.

Plus, at the bottom of the page is a listing of any offspring that are currently up for sale, or at auction.

What’s more, the Stud Book has a ranking section, with various filters. So, you can choose to see, eg, from turf sprinters, who has the most winners, stakes winners, earnings, etc. What’s more, you can choose to filter just for first crop sires (up to the fourth crop). All these rankings can help you make a much more informed decision about which stallion represents the best value for your mare.


HORSE PAGE STALLION STATS
With SIMperior you have access to additional stats right on the stallion’s regular page, without needing to access the Stud Book. For example, you might have a turf horse that’s doing badly. If you click on the sire, you might note that he has had quite a number of All Weather winners, as well as turf winners. So, that would be a clue that it would be a good idea to give your struggling horse a try over All Weather.


HORSE WHISPERER
With a SIMperior membership, you can pay $5000 and ask the Horse Whisperer, Clark Hoss, about your horse’s preference for track condition. You only need to pay for the Horse Whisperer once for each horse. His response comes across as rather colorful, but it’s usual pretty obvious what he means. (I would think that a horse that is inclined to “dive off a bridge to the water below” would really love to run on a sloppy track or soft turf surface.)


OFFICE CHART
Since I subscribed to SIMperior on my first day in SIM, I don’t remember what a non-SIMperior office looks like, when browsing through the barns. I just know it’s a really nice thing to have the columns for date of the last workout, the date of the last race, and the date if the horse is entered for another race. Most especially, being able to sort by those columns is very helpful in managing one’s stable.


PREMIUM PARK
Just as Trial Park is only for new players, and Junior High is only for junior players, Premium Park in Kentucky is only for SIMperior players. What I like most is that it tends to offer a much more expanded choice of MSW races, and conditioned allowance races.


THE EDGE NEWSLETTER
The Edge is a weekly newsletter. Each issue normally features an article by The Steward about a particular stallion currently standing at stud. (Such an article can give a stallion a tremendous boost in popularity, but he must be owned by a SIMperior player, and must have a headshot, to be considered for an article.) Plus, each issue has an interview with a SIMperior player. There’s also small blurbs about horses coming up in the next Steward-bred auction, a 2yo that has debuted in an impressive manner, any upcoming changes to SIM, and now there’s a new section on mixed breeds.


FOAL MARKINGS
All players can choose the gender and color of their foals, if they desire. With SIMperior, you can also choose the markings (which might be particularly important if you’re anticipating your future star eventually being worthy of a headshot).


EXPANDED TECHNOLOGY
I can’t speak to this advantage, because I don’t use modern gadgets, but SIMperior allows the player to see race results or message notices via email or SMS text messages.


That’s a lot packed into a SIMperior membership!

You can test SIMperior for one week by paying a mere 2,000 game points. From there, the weekly price is discounted for buying more weeks, up to 45,000 game points for a full year’s 52-week subscription.

Sometimes players have had SIMperior, and then couldn’t renew it for financial reasons. But I’ve never heard anyone say that a subscription wasn’t worth the price. With a SIMperior membership, you get a lot of perks that can make you a lot more efficient player, and a smarter player.

I urge each and every player to at least give it a week’s trial.

---

Back to New Players articles