User blog:BonesMcGee/Brainstorm: Potential savings in using the hurry hatch trick

It didn't occur to me until now that there are significant cost savings to be had by using the hurry hatch trick to obtain a rare dino. Obviously, a lot of you already knew this but I'm just now figuring this out. If you do the math, you stand to save a significant amount of coins or at the very least a lot of time by using the trick even if you only get a tier 1 dinosaur. (Up to a point, of course. You're still taking a gamble.)

Say you wanted to get a tier 1 dino by fusing two common dinos. If you were to start from scratch, first you would purchase a random egg (250 coins) and let's say the result is a common dino. It would cost you an additional 4600 coins to raise that dino to lvl 4, the minimum age require for fusing. Next, you would repeat that entire process for a second common dino (250 + 4600 = 4850 coins). Finally, you would fuse the two lvl 4 common dinos together.

Now add the cost of the two dinos together (4850 + 4850) plus the cost of fusion (3000), and you have expended 12,700 coins to get your tier 1 dino.

So you could do that, or you could take a gamble with the hurry hatch trick. With the hurry hatch trick you could potentially get a tier 1 or higher at the cost of 250 coins per attempt. So theoretically you could spend up to 12,500 coins using the hurry hatch trick 50 times (250 coins x 50 attempts = 12,500 coins) and you would still be saving 200 coins even if all you got was a Dimetrodon (Tier 1).

However, using the hurry hatch trick means you miss out on your common dinos hourly earnings. Assuming perfect feeding (no wasted downtime between feeds) and no habitat bonuses, each dino would earn 940 coins while being fed to lvl 4. So subtracting 1880 coins (940 coins x 2 dinos) from our previous total (12,700 coins) equals 10,820 coins to reach a Teir 1 dino. That equates to approximately 43 attempts before you would sustain a loss if a Tier 1 dino is the end result.

If the end result from using the hurry hatch trick is a tier 2 or tier 3 dinosaur, then you could justify a much higher number of attempts. However, that's the catch. There is no way to know what tier you will get or even if you will get one at all before you give up. After more than 50 attempts, getting a teir 1 dino egg will result in a loss. And then there's always the chance that you could reach 60, 70, or even more attempts without success. If you gave up, you are guaranteed to incur a significant loss. If you get get a teir 2 or 3 dinosaur after 50+ attempts, you could still come out ahead but I don't have the specifics yet.

I'll update this post once I know the minimum cost to obtain a tier 3 dino the old fashioned way. Then we can see what number of attempts results in a loss for the cheapest tier 2 dino and the cheapest tier 3 dino.

Update (10 AUG 12): For the sake of keeping good records, I'll be recording the number of attempts for each successful hurry hatch trick my wife or I attempt. I also adjusted the post above to reflect the lack of dino earnings when using the hurry hatch trick. Thank you, Deen700, for pointing that out.

Update (21 AUG 12): Redesigned the table with respect to Robin's recommendations below. Changed the "Tier" column to "Egg" and added the "Probability Value" column.

REPS = Repetitions, or the number of hurry hatch tricks attempted consecutively.

PROB. VAL = Probability value. For more info, see the master list of Dinos.