Pastures

[larissar]

I'd think you would end up needing more pastures for Draft horses and less for the same quantity of ponies.

But yes you are right the ponies would be overweight if kept in pastures which have no trouble over growing.
There are some techniques one could use to overcome this. The first to come to my mind would be to use a kind of pasture rotation where one pasture could be used for haying, and when it's cut way back bring the ponies in, then cut back the other pasture.
Or you could keep a couple draft horses there too to keep the pasture growth under control. Some horses/pony types are going to be more difficult to keep than others. These are just challenges within the game.

I could also create dry-lot paddocks which don't grow grasses so you could keep ponies in there and just make sure they have lots of hay added to the pasture (art work for hay is completed, this is a feature coming soon, dry lots would be a very simple addition too)

[Argent]

Yes, you'd need more pastures to keep the same number of drafts. But you'd need more pastures than absolutely necessary to keep any number of ponies. If a pony grazes 1/40 of a pasture, you should be able to keep 40 ponies comfortably in one pasture, but if the limit per pasture is 20 horses, you'd have to build a second pasture that you don't really need.

Dry lots would be great. I'd be more inclined to use them with performance horses; they get some time out and their diet stays better regulated. I'd create them as sets/rows of 10 or 20 or whatever, so when you went to the paddock page, you'd scroll by rows of lined up paddocks.

[larissar]

Right, I was thinking of the pasture limits, but you were thinking of the grazing limits.

The pastures should be pretty balanced though so you won't end up with quite that much wasted grass, but this is one of those things we'll have to adjust through actual game play testing too.

I hadn't considered the diet control aspect for performance horses but you are right there. Stalled horses will also be assigned to a pasture and you determine how much turnout time they get so assigning them in a dry lot instead of one of your main pastures would work quite well.

[Argent]

Perhaps instead of "horse capacity" it could be "pasture utilization." So, based on the pasture quality, and the number of horses of particular sizes you have on pasture, that status bar would shift. For example, if drafts eat twice as much as ponies, when you put 10 drafts on a pasture, utilization would be at 100%, whereas 10 ponies would be at just 50%. This makes horse stocking rates more dependent on what the pasture can actually support instead of an arbitrary value. It's functionally similar, but more of a soft limit, and players would not have to buy a bunch of heavy horses to fill up space.