Sheep Meadow Road Games

[0.9.13.3] - 2026-10-28

Added

  • New and improved race engine, features below and more in improved also, the new engine is a bit slower to sim, and we will be looking in making it more efficient in the coming updates
  • Added a “target speed sensitivity” setting. It defines how fast accelerate/decelerate buttons change the target speed
  • Added the skip button back to races (hold to skip). If the player is controlling the horse when skipping, the AI will take control and finish the race.
  • Added a riding difficulty setting (Settings > Race & Simulation > Races) with three options, easy, normal and hard. In addition a custom option.
  • A horse that interferes with another can be placed behind it by a Stewards’ Enquiry. The enquiry can be turned off in Settings > Race & Simulation (online races always hold one)
  • Lane changes, sudden surges and bumps now cost stamina. In a bump both horses pay, the one that caused it twice as much
  • Added sideways sway to all horses’ movement, including the player-controlled horse. The sway is quite small but should allow horses to sometimes squeeze through the gaps left by the horses in front. Tired and hot-tempered horses sway more, and trotters sway half as much
  • Added different types of (rare) mishaps to the start of the race, which can happen to any horse including yours: Slow start makes the horse start noticeably slower than everyone else, a stumble causes the horse to slow down noticeably after the start, and veering causes the horse to veer to one side and slow down
  • Harness worlds call the distance bands Short, Standard, Long, Extra Long and Marathon, with trotting distances
  • Added all the columns from Stable page as options for custom tab columns
  • You can now export and import people
  • You can now export and import stables

Improved

  • In race settings you can now turn on a help timer if you would like for the race start
  • The valuation model has had some more balancing
  • In horse import and export you can now also export stats etc. with the horse
  • In IPO and secondary offering, shareholders now have the right 14 days to participate at a 10% discount
  • Largest shareholder now controlls stable, even if they don’t own over 50%
  • On staff page training tab is now merged into staff, and staff table is also shown in the overview
  • Pins are now called groups as it describes them a bit better
  • In breeding page, the three contract tabs have been consolidated to one to be clearer
  • You can now autobalance staff with the context menu
  • Medical page tabs restructured and some of them combined
  • Racecourse and auctionhouse sidebar pages are now merged into venue page
  • In automation settings you can now choose horse buy mode
  • In finance page merge the graph pages to income etc.
  • Remove shares page from sidebar, move the market page to the person detail page under share tab, move the equity controls (IPO, Dividend etc.) under the company detail page under shares tab
  • Move share trade history table under person share tab instead of having under stable finance page
  • In the feedback form you can now also add optional email, we noticed that for some reports there are already solutions in the game, but now we can’t contact the reporter in anyway
  • Move merge stables and put under another, under the company -> shares -> deals
  • Rebalanced running styles
  • If blocked in front, jockeys now look further down the track to find a free lane. Reaction time based on jockey skill
  • When picking a lane on the home stretch, better jockeys prefer to move towards the middle of the track instead of the edges to avoid a blocking horse
  • Horses spend their stamina more aggressively
  • A horse with enough stamina left starts its final spurt earlier
  • If a running style is missing, the styles that are present spread out to cover the missing positions
  • Horses aiming to run at the same pace should no longer run at the same exact speed for longer periods of time
  • The speed out of the gate is now based on the running style. The frontrunners and the pressers take off faster than the rest of the field, frontrunners fighting for the best early position
  • Horses start slowing down at different times after the initial sprint, and slow down more gently overall. A bad jockey can start slowing down to a manageable pace too early
  • The lead horse no longer moves towards the inner lane at the final stretch
  • Horses spread out after last turn, trying to find the closest gap if not in first place. Better jockeys start this process earlier
  • Stragglers are now ignored in the running style band logic
  • Jockey’s skill has a bigger effect on the race. A higher jockey skill improves: collision avoidance, escaping from being boxed in, collision debuff recovery speed, and chase timing
  • Harness race pace is more accurate
  • Horses no longer hit the exact same top speed
  • Distance preference now works differently in each direction. A horse dropped back to a shorter race than it prefers uses less stamina but runs slower. A horse stepped up to a longer race keeps its speed and runs a bit faster through the race, but uses its stamina too fast and can run out of it just before the finish
  • Strength, stamina and acceleration have a greater effect during races
  • Faster horses win ~40-50% of races
  • Top star-rated horse wins ~30-37% of the time
  • Horses running at their preferred distance do better than horses running at other distances
  • Perfect horses can run about 0.5-1.5% faster than the world record time
  • Rebalanced stamina usage: in most races ~60-90% of horses spend 95-100% of their stamina, and fewer than 10% of horses finish with more than 10% of stamina left. In sprints horses keep more in reserve, harness sprinters the most
  • An unchallenged leader is no longer held back to 88% of its pace
  • A horse that is the only starter in a race (for example a time trial) no longer pays the extra stamina cost of running without cover
  • Rebalanced jockeys’ skill effect on the horse: the best and worst jockeys make a horse about 3% faster or slower than an average jockey. Before, most jockeys gave the same maximum boost
  • Star ratings now weigh speed much more heavily. This gives the player a more realistic image of how well a horse should do in a race. The same rating is also used for race entries, odds, tipsters, race analysis and CPU stables
  • A horse that runs into another from behind loses some of its acceleration for a moment, so it no longer takes off like a rocket when it gets clear
  • Horses of the same running style no longer start pushing towards the leaders at the exact same moment
  • A horse behind a slower one now eases off smoothly instead of stopping dead, and bumps slow horses down gradually
  • Races now play out the same way at every Simulation quality setting. Before, front-runners did worse on Balanced
  • The speed bar is more accurate: it fills relative to the top speed the horse can actually reach at that moment, which keeps changing during the race
  • Watched offline races now run mostly on the C++ race engine on Windows and macOS, which keeps them in line with simulated races and makes them run much faster. Online races and Linux still use the old engine
  • Harness races now judge a horse’s preferred distance by the race’s actual length

Fixed

  • Filters now use the localized currencys
  • Translations should cover more stuff, and partially also common coat colors
  • Zombie stables
  • NPC were a bit vasteful with their subscriptions leading to some liquidations
  • Lowered medical bay price
  • Godmode now increases intelligence but keeps temperament since lowest temperament is not necessarily the best
  • Horse highlight flickering when it’s right on the edge of turning on/off
  • Bug that caused a horse to use less stamina when running faster than world record pace
  • Watched races giving different results than simulated races. Stamina use, race timing and how the field is set up now match
  • Very long races sometimes being stopped early. A race now only counts as stuck when the unfinished horses stop moving. A horse you are riding and have stopped does not count
  • Races on straight tracks slowing horses down as if they were on a bend
  • Horses in watched races sometimes jumping back to the gate after the start
  • Very close finishes sometimes showing a different order than the real one. Exact ties are no longer decided at random
  • Exhausted horses slowing down by a different amount in watched and simulated races
  • Harness worlds getting race days without races at player-built and older racecourses. Loading a save removes the empty upcoming race days
  • Scenery sometimes showing below the track
  • The performance rating in simulated races counting the horse’s own rating as part of the field it raced against
  • The speeds shown in live races (hover panel, the label below your horse, the HUD and the field strip) could all show a different number at the same moment
  • Pillgroup outline colors on lighter themes fixed
  • Racecoursed unnerfed a bit, but still has a crowd model so if you spam races with many racecourses, you will go negative
  • Multiple custom tab setting overwrote each other
  • Not being able to open the table menu on controller

Original announcement on Steam

Horse Racing Manager on Steam
All devlogs