[Jack Simth]

Originally posted by Ed Kolis:
Just don't make me come up with any more examples, you're running me out of ideas and the game hasn't even started yet!

If you want a way to come up with lots & lots of possibilities, I have a suggestion. Get some dice (or a good random number generation program - many of the better Texas Instrument calculators have a random function built in, as do many programming Languages), and make lists of all the classes of stuff in the game: components, facilities, planets, hulls, et cetera - anything & everything moddable. Make more lists for each class of thing, listing all the possible effects that type of thing can have. Also make a list of every entry in your data files in that class of thing. Next, make a list of things that can happen: swap effects with..., more effect, lesser effect, more cost, less cost, new effect, remove effect, et cetera - everything you can think of. Number all of the lists. Then, use dice to select what to change: roll once to get the overall Category of thing you are changing (components, facilities, planets, et cetera), again to select the specific item that gets changed (engine, bridge, Master computer, et cetera), roll again to see what to do to it (More effect, lesser effect, more cost, less cost, new effect, remove effect, et cetera), then change it accordingly. (Note, for swap effect with.... you will want to roll from the same overall Category to select the thing to swap with; for new effect you roll on the list of possible effects for that class of thing, for remove effect you roll on the effects the thing has, for +/- effectiveness you roll for the amount and for which effect it has that gets changed and how much it gets changed by, et cetera - I'm sure you get the idea). Lastly, make the actual change.

This will provide you with a virtually unlimited number of possible changes, and it will do so quite chaotically (if you have fair dice, that is). If you like, you can start out by rolling a die to see how many times you run this procedure that cycle.