Sectorgame

Can anyone point me towards a tut for smoothing ? There's pretty much no info in the max help Guides.

Or if anyone can pass on some rule of thumbs (so to speak) that'd be appreciated. I've never been able to smooth a mesh properly without making it worse than when I started

There's several ways of doing it, really. You can either autosmooth the entire mesh, or you can select faces that you want to be part of a group, assign them one of the numbers, and smooth them at an angle of your choice