Thanks for the help, but I'm not sure you understood what I wanted to do, that or its more complicated to do than I first thought.

Forgetting the ultimate aim of the game, all I'm trying to do is create a function which will place higher values in the centre of a 2D array which decrease outwards like a circle to 0. Is there a simple elegant way of doing this?
The idea I had on the way back from work was that as it looks at each cell in turn it applies a formula which is dependant on the distance from the centre which means that the values will be lower at the edges and higher in the center.

I've been trying to think this through for days but the ideas are helping!

Whitt