Umamusume: Pretty Derby [horse girl raising simulator]

My Gold ship missed on Swinging Maestro yesterday in Round 2 what felt like a million times. I had at least 4 if not 5 races lost to missing all recovery skills. The rest were mostly getting blocked and otherwise was just having worse positioning on the final corner than the other contenders. Went 3/2 (two losses in this set from missing both SM and Go-Home)/3/3.

I initially went with 2 Dominator debuffers, but ran into so many umas with bad/borderline stam in the first set that I switched back to Nice Nature. With a couple exceptions, I didn't notice the competition in Round 2 Group A being that much better than Round 1. Generally, I had pretty decent rng though against good builds and would have terrible rng in races against the bad builds.

Today went better. Started out on a 4-win streak and ultimately went 4/2/4/3. Had a couple very narrow losses - one where I missed Go-Home and was a length or so in front of the other Gold Ship who then activated Triumphant Pulse to barely win, and in another she missed both accel. skills on the final corner despite being in position to activate and barely lost.

I was in great position to win all 5 in the first set when I got matched against some poorly built Umas. The opposing Gold Ships had relatively low speed and stamina, but mine decided to late start (might have also had bad mood - I forget) and found a way to get herself horribly blocked. In the 3rd set, I had a 3-win streak going and Golshi definitely had a bad mood this time and again got blocked to miss out on a perfect set.

Also ran into a couple very bizarre team comps today that I couldn't tell if those people were throwing for some reason or if they just totally lucked their way into Group A.

Grand_Kirby posted...

Well, I'm doing better in Group B at least. Made it to the final in my first try.

Does time of day matter when matchmaking? Because I've always felt in most games you get the more hardcore people when you play late at night, and that was the only time I had before in the first round. On the other hand, it feels ambiguous whether you're actually directly racing against other people in this mode at the same time.

Nice! I did see a couple of times people using the stamp-emote things after a race finished, so theoretically it was in real time. I've also heard that it is possible to get matched asynchronously against people even before the final round, but I assume it only does that if it can't find live opponents for you.

Also, supposedly, your matchmaking pool is selected when you use your ticket, so I don't know what happens if you use the ticket and then wait several hours to hit the race button.

registration for the final is up. you have 11.5 hours to register a team or it'll use the last team you used (so not a problem unless you were trying other things aside from your best)

Round 2 was brutal for me. In Round 1 Graded league, there was typically one or two Uma's on the same level as my Gold Ship (1200 speed, near 1k stam, lots of wit), but I'd usually win against them, there wasn't a single run I didn't get 3+ wins on. In Round 2, there was usually 4 other horses comparable or BETTER. I also noticed they all had 1k power as well, which is a stat I haven't really respected that much in comparison to speed and stam. I kept getting 2 wins but ended up not getting a third win on any run, so I ended up in Group B for the finals, RIP.

There were so many races where I watched my Gold Ship gaining speed on the enemy ace in the lead, just to catch up right at the finish line and lose by a nose. RIP. I made a better Air Groove but even though she often held 1st or 2nd for most of the race she always fell behind the enemy aces at the very end, never took a single race, so trying to make her a backup ace didn't pay off.

Oh well!

yeah power is your acceleration so for anything shorter than long it's also an important stat

mile and sprint races, for example, you want both speed and power maxed (ideally) to get to the top speed as quick as possible since the race is so short. it was also important for this CM which is why most of the top goldships likely have Maruzenky or Mejiro Ryans uniques (or both) as they give a ton of acceleration and lets them hit the top speed. Otherwise you might have 1200 speed but never actually hit that top speed.

Next CM is so long that it's not relevant, however, and it's more about having enough stamina to finish

It'll be basically impossible to worry about power because of the steep stamina/guts requirements plus speed is more important, but everyone will still be shooting for Straightaway Spurt from my understanding on their end closers (except Taishin who will take the gold version obviously).

And speaking of Mejiro Ryan's Let's Pump Some Iron, I feel like I wasted a lot of Gold Ship runs trying to get SFV, Pump, and Red Shift along with Medium S when it was a lot more reasonable to settle just for SFV+RS and Medium S for the 1st CM. It was going to take some hardcore grinding to run 3 aces where Pump would have really mattered.

I guess it was still somewhat useful if you ran two aces, but it was pretty pointless 95%+ of the time running two debuffers as Golshi would find herself in essentially 1 of 2 scenarios if she was 6th entering the final corner.

The first being that she was close enough to the rest of the pack and had a lane to pass to find herself in 5th on the corner to trigger Maruzensky's unique, Taiki's unique, or both to easily win. The second being that even if she activated Pump, she was so far back that it would never make a difference even if she activated it plus Shooting for Victory and Red Shift.

Running more aces changes things up because she might otherwise never break out of 6th while simultaneously finding herself in 6th more often if you have 1-2 more strong umas in the race that she'd struggle to pass on the final corner. But there also wasn't much point in running more than Golshi as your ace if you didn't grind really hard to make a serious pace chaser contender (much less any other style) in addition.

tl;dr: imo, Pump even was way overhyped for 99%+ of the player base just because it can activate earlier.

3rd place, group A. Winning Ticket had a late start, was blocked by the End Closers for the first half of the race but made it up to third for the final spurt. Without the late start I think she wouldve gotten second, but there was a Gold Ship she had no chance of beating in first.

my oguri burst out in the front immediately (the lucky pace chaser buff I presume) and won by 5 lengths.

the two good goldships (mine and someone else) got blocked pretty bad which worked out fine for me.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/9/9f20486e.jpg

Mayano got passed and I thought it was all over, but she overtook the lead at literally the last second. I jumped out of my seat.

Checked my opponents' records before watching the Graded Group A Final and was hoping for the best. I had won 55/80 going in, and based off the umas they entered, the other two were 38/80 and 45/80.

Was excited for a second to see my Golshi was in great mood before realizing they in fact give everyone great mood for the final. Both opponents ran Nice Nature as their only debuffer.

One was running Oguri + Tachyon as Pace Aces with questionable stamina that I wasn't sure was enough or not since they'd only be getting hit by one Nice Nature (though I did have all of the pace 1% stamina debuffs on both my Agnes and Grass Wonder I ran), and the other was running a fairly strong Golshi along with a Late Surger Symboli that only had 1060 SPD (but it did have medium s + double circle left-handed).

I was begging the game not to give my Gold Ship a late start, but what do you know, Gold Ship immediately late starts.

She then proceeds to hit every single skill she could trigger on the first corner and moves into 4th (she also got the perfect gate #9 to pass everyone on the outside + hit double circ. Outer Post Proficiency). From there, she's jockeying back and forth with Symboli for 4th/5th with Oguri and Tachyon way out in front and a Nice Nature all the way up in 3rd due to so many Surgers and Closers in the race.

At this point midway through the race, my only worry is that Tachyon and Oguri both have Medium S and max Speed in addition to a sizable lead. Also, my Gold Ship has no way of triggering Anchors Aweigh to get a boost when entering the late-race since she's so far forward.

Usually that still doesn't matter when Golshi is that far up though, so I'm still hoping for the best. She hits Go-Home Specialist and now is slightly in front of Symboli and has the outside lane with no chance of being blocked while the Symboli has to worry about the Nice Nature directly in front of her while Golshi is on her outside.

Late-race starts, and as soon as she's able, both SFV and Red Shift activate rocketing Gold Ship forward. Moreover, my Agnes debuffer simultaneously activates her Dominator skill. Both Grass and Agnes activate Hesitant Pace Chasers a little bit afterward.

All my worries fade away as I see Gold Ship enter 1st just slightly after the final corner ends. A few strides later, Grass Wonder activates her Dominator. I think I'm home free.

Then a concern that never crossed my mind emerges. Symboli Rudolf immediately shifted lanes after my Gold Ship passed the 3rd place Nice Nature giving her free reign to pass the Tachyon and Oguri ahead and trigger her unique, Behold Thine Emperor's Divine Might.

I knew it was strong, but not this strong (I also wasn't even thinking about it having triggered until after the race was over). Compounding the problem, my Gold Ship ran one lane wider than she needed to meaning that Symboli was able to make up some ground on the final corner. Now, not only is this Symboli keeping up stride for stride despite having only Late Surger top speed against an End Closer and 140 less Speed stat points, she's actually closing the gap in the final 200m.

I start panicking wondering if my Gold Ship somehow didn't have enough stamina or something, even though that was impossible with hitting both gold recoveries.

Then it happens. With ~30m left, Symboli's unique finishes, and she's successfully passed every uma... except my Golshi who wins by 2 and 1/2 lengths! The Gold Ship meta prevails!

This game may be RNG stacked on RNG stacked on RNG, but it does produce fun moments like these when all of your plans finally come to fruition.

Forgot to mention the other strong Golshi was running 8th-9th most of the race and never had a chance. She still finished in third 10 1/2 lengths out of 1st.

https://twitter.com/uma_musu_hacha/status/1960628603940466856

Price sounds about right for the amount of content it offers

And there is a point shop on Steam if you want pixel art of the horse girls without having the game.
https://store.steampowered.com/points/shop/app/2313020/

That said there is 1 online achievement/trophy. So if anyone ends up getting it on PS4, please let me know. Online is completely dead.

I'm 130/200 on the new banner, really bad position to be in.

There's apparently a cup coming up but I don't know if the rewards will show up before the 10th.

I don't think the 1st Round for Gemini starts until the 10th.

It looks like I'm going to fail winning the Japanese Derby during this celebration week. Might have one or two good tries left. Anybody have tips for building a character specifically to win the Japanese Derby?

I'd say for winning races in career mode, front runners are usually safe bets because you have practically no chance of getting blocked. Only potential scare is a late start, so if they can learn Focus even better. get stamina between 250-300, speed as high as you can, and power/wit ideally at least 200 and you should be fine (even these might be overkill but something to aim for at least)

Do BNW have improved chances of winning their respective Triple Crowns? In my Winning Ticket runs, Narita Taishin always wins the Satsuki Sho and then Winning Ticket has to FOCUS UP and achieve her dream of winning the Japanese Derby.... then Hayahide says she'll win the next one... and then she wins the Kikuka Sho....

Just did my first Narita Taishin race and easily got 1st in Satsuki Sho.... then got 2nd to Winning Ticket in the Derby and 2nd Hayahide in Kikuka Sho

Maybe you just gotta believe in CANON and play Winning Ticket.

You do need to make sure you have 300+ stam at least since its a medium, there's lots of racers who get the Derby as part of their career after only doing miles or whatever and the stam requirement hits you like a truck

I swear for Triple Crown/Tiara there's always a uma that just seems to get juiced up purely to deny you the triple.

I can get the double pretty easily, but something seems to block the triple for me like 90% of the time. It could be a stam thing cause I normally don't laser focus on it unless I have Longs.

Finally got Mayano at 154/200 pulls. Real thankful I didn't have to swipe cause damn I don't got the money for those prices (I'm a Monthly Pass spender at best).

Monthly carots from our guild ranking as well as making it to Rank 6 in pvp for the first time really came in clutch.

Going to be a while before I can spark for something. I doubt I"ll be able to get Halloween Rice Shower in a few months, but the uma after that I'm interested in is Twin Turbo which should be a ways off.

Twin Turbo is also a 1* Uma, because she introduces the new running style, so it won't be too hard to get her with free pulls or while pulling for a rarer uma

What the hell would a new running style even be? Running on the fence like a ninja?

Also I'm sorry to say the Canon law is broken, I just did another Narita Taishin run and I lost the Satsuki Sho but took 1st in the Derby and Kikuka Sho. RIP Zazi's Derby win

CoolCly posted...

What the hell would a new running style even be?

You know how Bakushin is all "Full Speed, head empty"?

Twin Turbo is even more so.

Her running style apparently is a supercharged version of front runner where she burns through her stamina to run even faster.

So she either ends up way in the lead or collapses from exhaustion.

Good to know she's a 1* though! That'll let me save up for another seasonal.

Interesting - all four current styles just do a cruiser speed until the late race when they all actually start using their speed stat. Does the new style actually just accelerate up to their speed until their HP runs out or something in the early or mid race or something - then just start cruising and hope nobody catches up later? I'd assume they don't speed up in the late race at all then.

Basically just doing your final spurt early

Not sure how it works mechanically, but that sounds about right. I imagine she's at risk of getting absolutely ruined by debuffs if Great Escape (Her "Front Runner but more" strategy, which is apparently a skill?) doesn't make her immune to all the Front Runner debuffs.

Guess we'll see when she comes out.

If its a skill, then yeah she probably still counts as a Front Runner

I was able to get a Derby win with Rice Shower as a Pace Chaser rolling 3/2/1 of Stamina/Speed/Strength supports. I don't remember my stats or skills but I wasn't feeling great about it leading up to the Derby. Grateful the RNG took pity on me.

Which option do y'all take for your Team Trials opponent? I (a F2P casual) was only taking the easy one, but I've been experimenting with medium and hard and it seems kinda like a crapshoot.

Always choose hard. You get more points, and the results are mostly random anyway. You can dominate a higher leveled opponent and completely bust against a lower leveled opponent fairly regularly.

The only race that matters for your ranking is whichever was your highest scoring one for the week, so even if you only get a clean sweep 1/10 times against the hardest match up if you just do it like 60 times a week you're bound to get a great score eventually.

So for the Gemini Cup, are yall choosing Open League or Graded League?

That's like asking me if I dodge or parry

As a serious answer, if you are raising only B+ horses then I would just do open. There will still be whales/good players who intentionally raise their horses to be incredible horses in B+ and avoid doing less effective skills/stats that push the horse into A, so it might not actually be "easier" in general. But the A rank horses in Graded league will just absolutely kill you

if you actually are raising A or better horses - then its a tough call. Just because you are raising A horses doesn't mean they are that good - if you get lots of skills that don't do much to help you win, you'll get into A and then just get destroyed by the actually killer A rank horses that have great stats and great gold skills that are just what they need. So it might be best to just take your best B+ horses down to Open league and put up with whatever you are finding there, and then just try to use the tricks you can find online to keep newer horses you raise in the B+ tier too

Personally, I'm long past the stage where every horse I raise is A rank, and I cannot be bother to try to limit their rating to get more power per rating or whatever. I just make them the absolute best I can every career and stick them on my Trials Team if they are the best one I've made. I don't worry too much about the rating drawing bigger enemies on me. My girls are killers

So I'll just take Graded league, even if I get slaughtered like I did in Round 2 of the Taurus Cup

BTW I ended up in Group B for the Finals of that cup after my disastrous Round 2 performance.... and I absolutely smoked the teams I went up against. It was a little bittersweet. I know I would have gotten rolled in the group A Finals and ended third... but it felt like I belonged there instead of against the children I killed in Group B.

I was completely outclassed last cup and I still placed well enough to get better rewards than if I did the lesser grade.

I'm not sure how many people noticed, but they're changing the requirements to get into the final round to make it easier. So unless you think you'll be completely unable to get one win in Graded but will also completely dominate in Open I think going Graded is better.

Tragic fucking news

https://www.straitstimes.com/asia/east-asia/retired-japanese-racehorse-haru-urara-famed-for-losing-all-her-races-dies-aged-29

Good grief is training for Longs not f2p friendly.

All these S rank Speed/Stam umas. If I see an Oguri Cap I just assume they'll place 1st..

(Literally when I was typing that last sentence I ended up facing an actually normal one and won o.o)

For me its pretty much the goldship show again, which was expected. Few other horses have won (usually powered by whales) but like 90% my gold ship or someone elses

Yeah, this is the Gold Ship show. Never seen one lose if they grab the lead.

The PvP I've been largely ignoring because even dropping down to the B or lower grouping I'm getting destroyed in every match I participate in. I don't have the cash flow or knowledge of how to build within the system like this so I'll just keep trying to build up my trials team and strengthen my roster of Umas and support cards. I'm sure eventually I'll try to understand the meta and whatnot but right now I'm still working on a foundation. Haven't even reached A rank yet.

I think I'm kinda out on this game. I was enjoying it for a long time and enjoyed building up my horses for the first Taurus Cup, but I was pretty disappointed with the format. It felt like it was gonna be a fun enjoyable event to show off and put to use my best horses, but it turned into just a spammathon where I click the buttons as fast as I can to get through all of the rounds you do in a day for the rewards. Regular careers and daily races have all turned into that, but I figured this once a month event would be different.... They put in so many rounds to do in a day that its just back to skipping through.

I'm on track to perform in the Gemini Cup as about the same as Taurus, but eh. For games like this, what I need is strong goals to work towards over a long period of time. The Taurus Cup gave me that goal and invigorated my desire to build my team of killers to win it, but the actual event just wasn't that fun. This time around my efforts building my Narita Taishin were a bit halfhearted, and I just haven't even run the races since the first day. I can't imagine spending a bunch of time building a new team for anything now, so that's probably it for me.

My other complaints:

It kinda sucks that the daily requires doing a full career run. It's just too much to do on a daily basis. I fell off on doing them a week or two ago and I just don't care to start doing them again.

The rewards on regular activities anyway are ABYSMAL. Like the login reward, dailies etc, give practically nothing. So I guess it doesn't really matter if I do the daily careers or not - most resources come from the events and giveaways that they do. So our f2p income doesn't come from steady gameplay, it comes at how generous Cygames decides to be (or, how generous they happened to be to JP in the original release, at an accelerated rate).

I think its a mistake for support cards and the racers to be pulled by the same currency. It takes a month or months to save up the currency to make pulling on a banner worthwhile - so.... if you are doing one, its an EXCEPTIONALLY long time before you can do the other. I feel like these should be gathered in parallel. Perhaps the trainee / support card tickets should be rewards for things more often, as they are now its pretty sparing

As a positive note, one thing my friends that played the game all did was skip all dialogue and events, thinking that this is all just uwu garbage, but I think that's a mistake. A lot of the support cards and the main URA scenario stuff aren't that great and skippable IMO but the career stories of the runners are mostly all great. I really loved reading through their growth. Some of them are nuts, some of them are sweet, some of them are inspiring. It's just a visual novel. The characters were the strongest part of this game.

Speaking of, I do need to do my Agnes Tachyeon career run still. I've only done her prologue story... she's an absolute psycho.

Yeah, I quit making Gold Ship ace runs weeks ago for this CM before switching to making debuffers, and then switching for prepping for the next CM.

People were hyping up Narita for this CM, and while I don't have her, she seems to just be a good back-up in case Gold Ship gets blocked or misses all her gold skills or something while also being even harder to build than Golshi.

My highest-speed Gold Ship ended up being way too inconsistent with 1028 stam and low-300 guts even while having BoFA and Cooldown (along with SM and Go-home), so I just settled for one with much less speed, but higher stam/guts. Went 2/5/2/2 and 3/2/3/3 in Round 2 A, but I'll probably use the high-speed gamble for the final round and pray.

I'll most likely finish making aces for CM 3 (going with Falcon, Suzuka, and Vodka and already have passable options for everyone but Vodka), but not too sure beyond that since CM4 is back to medium races and I presume you can mostly recycle Medium spark grandparents unless you really want medium/groundwork frontrunners grandparents/unborrowed parents.

Basically, it's just like you said. When you have a goal in this game to work towards, it's fun, but now that you've put in the time and seen all the content offered to this point, there's not much to do compounded by the long downtime between pulling on banners and the abysmal pity system. They also really need to expand beyond the 200 limit on umas. I'm sure I have a bunch more to scrap, but the process of looking through sparks and sorting is really rough.

CoolCly posted...

It kinda sucks that the daily requires doing a full career run. It's just too much to do on a daily basis. I fell off on doing them a week or two ago and I just don't care to start doing them again.

While you can fail out with someone that has an early fan requirement, it is one more thing to tap/click through along with all the other things you have to click through for dailies. Supposedly, they added a lot of QoL features later in the Japanese release to cut down on this like auto-runs for career and running all the team trials races at once or something, but it would be nice if they implemented them sooner rather than later.

I saw somewhere that they're looking to add some sooner than the JP version, but I also haven't heard of any timetable.

CoolCly posted...

The rewards on regular activities anyway are ABYSMAL. Like the login reward, dailies etc, give practically nothing. So I guess it doesn't really matter if I do the daily careers or not - most resources come from the events and giveaways that they do. So our f2p income doesn't come from steady gameplay, it comes at how generous Cygames decides to be (or, how generous they happened to be to JP in the original release, at an accelerated rate).

They did just make this sort of vague announcement that daily rewards and stuff are increasing. Don't know how much though.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/d/d73d59f3.jpg

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/1/1092dd94.jpg

Mayano taking home the gold for me! This was a rough cup so I was getting bodied hard round 1. Thankfully Group B had less whales running around.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/e/e25cfc2d.jpg

We take those.

Umbreon posted...

Mayano taking home the gold for me! This was a rough cup so I was getting bodied hard round 1. Thankfully Group B had less whales running around.

Black_Hydras posted...

We take those.

Nice.

I got matched with some really low win rate umas, with fairly low speed. My 1175 speed with Long S, Straightaway Spurt, and 370 wit Golshi starts out with hitting BoFA early on the first straight, misses Go-Home Specialist, misses Swinging Maestro, misses Cooldown even in the late-race (not that it matters at that point).

All of this with my Gold Ship being in perfect position in 2nd place all of the mid-race where it would have surged ahead to win by a mile, but it didn't have enough stamina with all of those whiffs so I took the 3rd place L.

At first, I figured that I should have used the more consistent Uma with more stam/guts, but then I realized if I whiffed on all 3 of its gold recoveries too, I still would have been screwed. Such a dumb CM. I mean, it is at its core an RNG game so you just have to roll with it, but this felt like 10x more random than the last one. I had some pretty bad luck in the prior rounds too, so I was hoping somehow the final race would turn things around like happened last time, but to no avail.

Not annoyed enough to drop the game just yet, but definitely going to take it way more casually going forward.

I won but I was in Group B of the baby league. Got my ass whooped in round 2

Got 2nd place in the Group A finals. I only beat 3rd place by a nose, which would've been a horrible disappointment given mine had about 200 stats better in every relevant category and they didn't have an aptitude advantage over me or anything.

I have once again won the baby group putting in barely any effort, with what I thought would be a filler on my team

New event started, and the freebie SSR card is Speed. Probably good to max that one out I think.

Damn, 6 10 pulls for amazon and totally bricked, like 9 golds.

The daily rewards have been given their announced boosts so that's fun. Between today and yesterday I think I've been given 4500 free carats so that's been a nice stimulus.