Talk:Drawings/@comment-4706996-20120220013516/@comment-4102115-20120220035335

Well there you go. Thanks for that info Mancini79. That really sux and is really stupid, but there's the answer. It can take forever to get a full Drawing of a structure you want, let alone two, let alone 3, from the Merchant's house. Thus doing the "fast" method of buying 4 items each 60mins would seem will take considerably more than $90M and 117 hourly visits now. The same principle applies to the Idol unfortunately. Drm5580 commented 20 days ago that he got lots of the same piece (up to 8) and none of others by donating. His wording was confusing and I initially thought there was a misunderstanding in what he posted, but Mancini79's comments has essentially confirmed that that is the case both for the Merchant's house and the Idol. Thus to get 3 complete sets of one, two or three of the structures via Idol donations will apparantly take considerably more than $360M!

As there is now apparantly not just the 72 total pieces to be offered for sale or received by donation, I'd have to assume that each time a blueprint is selected to be offered for sale or given up by the Idol, one of the 24 different pieces is selected at random at that moment, disregarding whatever was previously given up, bought or not-bought (swapped out unbought stock).

It would seem you have been quite unlucky in your spread Mancini79. Early on before I knew you needed more than 1 of each to build more than 1, I let some duplicates go by, and once I missed a Surfing station piece because I didn't have enough cash at the time and then I got busy on the phone and then he went hunting, and when he returned that piece was gone. I don't remember what # it was. And as I have no intention of building any low-profit Ruins or Water slides, I initially ignored those pieces. But then when I had the "72 cards" theory with a random selection of a card each time, I figured buying every piece as it came up even though I didn't want it would make the remaining wanted pieces randomly have a higher chance of coming up. This new information completely blows that principle away. Whether I buy a Ruins piece or not seems will make no difference to alter the probability ratio of what the next piece will be. So I might as well abandon again the other 2 structure pieces as they come up.

Ezcry's thought of fast-tracking by buying all 4 items every 60mins will still be the best compromise between getting randomly offered the pieces you need by rotating stock faster without spending hundreds of millions of dollars or Piastres and getting another piece offered about every 2nd hour. If you have the money, you can still do this method, the Idol method will cost hundreds of millions and leave you with no scrolls for the $5M gift.

For the record, here are the pieces that I have: (as noted, I did not get every piece that was offered when this quest started.) : As indicated, the spread seems quite decent to me: