So I posted a previous question about determining what an appropriate encounter would be for a party, based on point values. The best answer I got was that you can't judge whether a combat will be balanced by just looking at the points - instead you have to look at the overall picture, considering OCV, DCV, DC, DEF, SPD, etc.
I agree on that, but looking at multiple numbers like that can be misleading, at least to me, so I wrote an app to help me with it. I am still fiddling with it so that it can handle more parameters, but for now it has already helped me tweak a particular combat so that I didn't accidentally kill off the PC's in an unwinnable combat against lower-point opponents.
Anyhow, just to describe what it is: it allows me to enter the basic combat stats for the heroes and villains in a particular combat (OCV, DCV, DC, DEF, SPD) plus some flags relevant to my particular set of PC's (are they desolid, can they hit desolid, etc.). Then the software runs the combat, running through the different phases and letting each character pick one of the enemies as a target and attack them, (taking into consideration whether they are desolid) and tracking STUN and BODY to see if they get taken out.
I have used this now with a combat i planned for the game i ran last night. I have two PC's each built on 250 points, and i set up a combat where they would fight a 200-pt villain and his two 150-point henchmen. Based on the numbers, i felt it would be a good fight, but that the heroes would pretty easily prevail. Instead, when i set up the simulator to run 100 combats, the heroes only won 1% of the time. So i lowered a couple of the key stats of the villains (reducing their defenses, for instance) and i saw the win percentage start to creep up. I kept nerfing the bad guys until the heroes had a win percentage of about 70%, and then i knew that i had a "hard" encounter but one that was basically winnable.
Anyhow, up next i plan to add in the differences between killing attacks and normal attacks, the differences between energy and physical attacks, and then start to bring in area effects and mental attacks too. If anyone has suggestions or interest in following my progress on this, just let me know.
PS - i am doing this as a .NET web app with a SQL server backend right now, so it is not immediately easily portable for other people to use, but if there is interest, i can see about modifying it into a windows forms app that runs on access or XML so it could be downloadable by others.