Folks,

A wonderful gentleman over on the Hex forums created an excel-based combat simulator, running combats between 2 groups 10,000 times to give rough odds on how well a group would survive. I turned it into an online app and it's hosted here: http://www.filesandrecords.com/hex_01.html (last link on the page). Currently it doesn't cope with size differences, the initiative calculation's a bit ropey and differences in numbers aren't taken into account (i.e. if you outnumber your opponents, you don't get the ganging up bonuses). But I'm working on it.

It may be of use, it may not. I don't know how easy it'll be to work some magic into the system but I'm going to take a look.

If anyone's got any suggestions for other little online apps for either Desolation or Hex (basically, anything running on Ubiquity at the moment), let me know. I'm always up for a challenge. My next project is probably an online character card generator - some active discussion over at the Hex forums for the Strange Eons program here: http://www.exilegames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=1864 but I need someone to do the card art. All sorts of programming can be passed off as "work" but fooling around with GIMP is a little harder to explain. That's the GNU Image Manipulation Program - go and wash your minds out with carbolic. How could you think such a thing. This is a respectable forum. And, yes, I wish they'd change the program's name as well. You can tell it's almost 1AM, I'm drifting...