Today, I want to introduce an experimental PhD student training philosophy. Let’s start with some reddit memes. 

Every gaming subreddit has its own distinct meme culture. On r/chess, there's a demon who is summoned by an unsuspecting beginner asking “Why isn’t this checkmate?” 

These posts are gleefully deluged by responses saying “Google En Passant” in some form or other. Here’s my favorite variant:

Battle Brothers is an indie game of the turn-based strategy variety about keeping alive a company of muggles - farmhands and fishermen, disowned nobles and hedge knights, jugglers and pimps -  in a low-magic fantasy world filled with goblins, zombies, and dubious haircuts. 

Let me narrow down the kind of game that Battle Brothers is. It is sometimes said that all games are menus or parkour.

Battle Brothers is squarely a game of menus, a game of managing spreadsheets which happens to have graphics.

This is the skill tree for just one out of twenty brothers in a company.

The Battle Brothers subreddit has its own dominant meme, which is a little more mysterious than “Google En Passant.” Introducing … the Fat Newt.

Fat newt is a loving bastardization of the “fatigue neutral” build, which is a way of building brothers to minimize fatigue usage. Fatigue is the stamina/mana resource in this game, and attacking once costs about 15 fatigue. Normal brothers recover 15 fatigue a turn, enough to swing their weapon exactly once.

A trap that the vast majority of new players fall into, is to spend too many stat points leveling up fatigue on every brother, in order to build protagonist-energy characters - fencers, berserkers, and swordlancers - who can afford to attack two or even three times a turn. By spreading stats out, these fatigue-intensive builds are extremely demanding, requiring gifted brothers born with extraordinary talents. With all the points that should have gone to defenses and accuracy invested in fatigue, these would-be heroes meet their ignoble ends in the digestive tracts of Nachzehrers and Lindwurms as soon as they miss one too many attacks.

Only one-in-a-hundred brothers have the native talent to be a real hero, dancing across the battlefield like a murder of necrosavants. The community meta that has developed in reaction is the extremely counter-intuitive Fatigue Neutral build, a build that completely ignores the fatigue stat to pump everything else up. You rely entirely on the brother’s base fatigue regeneration to swing only once a turn. In exchange, you get to wear the heaviest armor, wield the biggest axe, and take all the defensive and utility perks that you want. Most importantly, with all this extra slack, while only one in a hundred brothers have the stats to be a hero, one in ten brothers can be a great fat newt.

My first companies were ragtag teams of wannabe heroes, who cut through easy fights like chaff but then got slaughtered in reciprocity when they faced the first real challenge. Then, I did some research and learned the gospel of the fat newt. 

Nowadays, my teams are usually built around the same solid foundation: an impenetrable fighting line of four to six Fatigue Neutral brothers who can stand their ground and decapitate once a turn, supplemented by a few elites and specialists. To my knowledge, Fat Newts are the most salient example of a build defined not by its strengths, but by its weaknesses. They highlight the possibility that under the right conditions, optimizing is primarily about choosing the right dump stat.

Next time, we operationalize the notion of training PhD students to be Fat Newts…