How to efficiently construct architecture with large amount of identical components

Draw yourself a picture and try to figure out an indexing scheme for the nets connecting the components. Once you have that, you can create a 'generate' loop where you instantiate the components.

As an example, look at the multiplexer posted in this thread:

http://www.alteraforum.com/forum/showthread.php?t=35540

There's a PDF showing the indexing scheme and then source showing the implementation. The same concept applies when creating adder-trees, bit-error-rate counters, etc.

Cheers,

Dave