Thx for opening this topic.
Randomization is something to break linear game play. For example, You want to create an ultimate weapon as a rare thing, maybe 1 or 2 for total game. To able to make this, you need to create very special game conditions (with much modding skill to code all the unique missions, characters, items, story) or gazillion of A-B-C items to limit to manufacture that weapon. This could be happen for huge mods like X-Com Files which got many story elements and objects to use for unique things. BUT you need to give huge time and knowledge to create such thing.
So you just want to add a more powerful plasma weapon to game. You can only do that just making the required items hell of a number.. like 150x heavy plasma..
is it cool? nop...You can make a special manufacture, name "Ultimate Plasma Weapon Project" and it could need 5x Heavy Plasma.. the result could be some Alien Allow, Elerium and %5 possibility a next generation plasma rifle. I can create many possibilities over this.. New armor, new energy resources, longer and mostly unpredictable/non-linear game play. Another possibility is to change all the research structure of alien tech. You can get alien power core tech just with one alien power core for example.. but you can make a manufacture to obtain the alien core from it with a percentage, you just cannot figure out alien tech with just a core (it could be done with randomize % research code too).
Randomization should be everywhere to have a complete line.
Research, Manufacture and Loot. OpenXcom allows re-research something from same source (which xenonauts does not have), so this researches can have percentage possibilities. So you can find something very unique when you interrogate 12. sectoid... because he wants to talk more then other 11..
why not?To get random stuff from aliens is very nice. Yes, you can do it already now, but it comes sooner or later rather then being very unique with special possibility code.. maybe first time maybe never..
For loot randomization, as here
https://openxcom.org/forum/index.php/topic,6868.0.html , loot transform (shortcut to have tons of mini manufactures for looted items) should have this too, so you can have a good working plasma weapon core from all the alien gear you collected with %5 chance per weapon.. Because all of the alien weapons just self-destruct, but sometimes they are less damaged..
You can create manufacture for every loot to get random items from them but it would kill the system because of ultra boring tons of projects.
Random Loot Transform with random manufacture is very smooth streamlined experience. Having random research to this is just perfection.
As code part, very simple for me
..
producedItems:
STR_ALIEN_ALLOY: 2-5 #RANDOMÄ°ZE 2 TO 5
STR_ELENIUM: 1-3
STR_POWER_CORE:0,50-1,35-2,15 #NO CORE %50, 1 CORE %35, 2 CORE %15
Thank you!