Talk:Merchant's house/@comment-4706996-20120317023134/@comment-4102115-20120608140307

Hiya there, you've been on this site for a while now, why not register a username so we can chat more friendly-like?

Your question has been answered, but it is not easy to explain and it is probably buried in the detail. More information is given here: Drawings. Each player will find some pieces totally rare - looking at the actual program code it appears that the blueprint piece being offered for sale is selected completely at random from all (6+9+9) 24 individual pieces, and the fact that only one piece is offered for sale at any given time, and that another piece will not be randomly selected for sale until at about 6 or so iterations after the last piece was either bought or swapped out, and if the piece being offered is unwanted and not bought, there is only a 25% chance that it is swapped out after an iteration and only if no scroll purchase is made that iteration also - all those facts mean that it takes many iterations (Leonid going hunting and then coming back) takes many hours of playing (whether that means hours or days for you depends on how long you play every day) for the next random piece to even be offered, so when you are down to waiting for one specific piece - it could appear the very next iteration, or it could appear in 100, or 1000 iterations. It is just like playing 0 on roulette - it could come up next spin, or not for 1000 spins. The code chooses the pieces randomly, and it makes zero difference whatsoever which pieces you've already bought, or whether you have left a piece unbought to be swapped out.

If you only buy the pieces you want and leave the pieces you don't want to be swapped out, then as long as you play several times per day every day, the laws of probability say you will probably get every piece to build one copy of the structure you want in about 2 months or so of playing. Multiply this by 3 if you want to build 3 copies of it.

The only way to speed this up is if you have sufficiently advanced far enough in the game to have lots of high-profitable structures already such that cash-flow is not an issue for you and you can afford to constantly donate $10,000, $100,000 and $250,000 to the Idol to obtain resources to purchase all 4 items from the store every iteration, sending Leonid away so he returns in 1 hour with 4 new items - doing that every hour every time you open the game - regardless that you will be buying pieces you do not want, duplicate pieces that you might already have 13 copies of!, and scrolls you will never use - but that will get you blueprint pieces 10 times faster, so that it will only take about 2 weeks on average to get a full drawing to build the structure you want, and about 1 month to build 3 copies.

It is a plain and simply fact that the ROI - Return On Investment time for these blueprint structures is about Infinity - ie. playing for years collecting income from these will not return a gross profit covering the actual purchase-cost taking into account all the redundant purchases, so the only reason to build these structures is for bragging rights to show that you slugged it out and went to the extreme effort of obtaining the pieces to build them.