[Thanks Inkhaven for hosting me! This is my fourth and last post and I'm already exhausted from writing. Wordpress.com!]

Last time, I introduced the concept of the “Fat Newt” (fatigue neutral) build, a way of skilling up characters in Battle Brothers that aims to be extremely economical with the fatigue resource, relying entirely on each brother’s base 15 fatigue regeneration per turn. This choice frees up stat and skill points to distribute evenly among offense, defense and utility. To illustrate, let’s compare two possible ways to build a bro.

The first brother is a Nimbleforged Cleaver Duelist, who wields the weighty and brutish one-handed Orc Cleaver. To successfully attack multiple times a turn, this brother needs sky-high base stats - attack, defense, HP, fatigue, and resolve - and a continuous investment of stat points to reach around 70 maximum fatigue. Furthermore, this build requires a specific suite of offensive and fatigue-recovery perks to function, such as Berserk, Killing Frenzy, Duelist, Cleaver Mastery, and Recover. Only the most seasoned of Hedge Knights and Sellswords can pull this build off consistently.

This brother also needs to stay alive in the thick of battle, so optimally he wears “Nimbleforged” armor, famed medium armors light enough not to eat up your fatigue pool and heavy enough to benefit from the Battleforged defensive perk. You might only drop a set of good Nimbleforged armor once or twice a campaign.

The second brother is a Fat Newt, who requires only 15 maximum fatigue to move and attack once a turn. Practically any brother - from Farmhands to Swordsmasters - who rolls high attack and defense can become a Fat Newt. By ignoring the fatigue stat, this brother can use those saved points to shore up weaknesses in HP and Resolve. And since he only needs so little fatigue, he can wear the bulky standard-issue Coat of Plates and wield the mighty two-handed Greataxe.

The Fat Newt also has a lot of slack distributing perk points. Instead of mandatory offensive perks like Berserk and Killing Frenzy, he takes Quick Hands (allowing him to swap to a Longaxe in a pinch to decapitate at range) and Fortified Mind (further bolstering his psychological defenses).

I want to make three salient points about the contrast between “Hero” type brothers like the Nimbleforged Cleaver Duelist on the one hand, and Fat Newts on the other:

• Heroes are one in a thousand, and Fat Newts are one in ten. Nimbleforged Cleaver Duelists require extraordinary luck and specialized gear to optimize. Fat Newts still have to roll well to function, but there is plenty of slack to shore up weaknesses, so they can basically be mass produced. If you want to build a company of twenty brothers, you cannot fill it with only Heroes unless you are willing to trawl through recruits for hundreds of in-game days.
• Fat Newts are not just “budget” Heroes, and Heroes do not Pareto dominate Fat Newts. Heroes are stretched so thin that they have real weaknesses and require a lot of babysitting. Generally speaking, Fat Newts will have more survivability and more utility, and they can often act as a menacing offtank to hold key defensive bottlenecks in the battlefield. Their increased utility allows them to save teammates in sticky situations and play more varied roles as the situation demands.
• The effectiveness of the fatigue stat scales in a complicated nonlinear way. A Nimbleforged Cleaver Duelist with 70 maximum fatigue can chew through a critical flank by himself, fighting on overdrive for four or five turns before tiring out. That time is often enough to decide the flow of the entire battle. The same brother with 35 maximum fatigue is much less than half as effective - he runs out of stamina on turn two, and then stares impotently as the enemy surrounds and overpowers his allies.

Primarily, my intention with this post is to convey a set of intuitions - derived from over three hundred hours of Battle Brothers - about what it might mean to be a working mathematician, Fat Newt style. 

Young people often learn by imitation and emulation, doubly so when they lose themselves in the maze of interlocking cults of personality that is academia. What ends up happening is that battalions of young mathematicians fixate on superhuman “Hero” types - Terry Tao, Peter Scholze, Andrew Wiles, Alexander Grothendieck and so on - mathematicians imbued with four or five standard deviations of intelligence, work ethic, and monomania, and try to “copy their build.” This turns out to be ineffective, maybe even surprisingly so.

I think there is an inarticulate mass delusion that might be called the “Half-a-Hero Trap.” Just being half as smart, and working half as many hours, as Terry Tao, and otherwise copying his behavior line-by-line, and one can hope to become a quarter as good of a mathematician. A quarter-Tao is still an impressive success, after all.

The real scaling laws here are much, much less kind. Setting the murky waters of intelligence scaling aside, let’s talk about productivity. One literal interpretation of fatigue is the number of productive work-shaped hours one can output in a week. If Alice has the capacity to work 70 hours a week, and Bob only 35, Bob is unfortunately much less than half as effective as a researcher. To make the point simply, if Alice and Bob both have 15 hours of teaching a week, then 70 - 15 is more than twice 35 - 15.

Even worse, the best mathematicians are hired to positions with the highest salaries, burdened by the least teaching responsibilities, at universities with the easiest students to manage. Think about the difference in research output between a mathematician who natively works 70 hours a week and only teaches the advanced probability seminar once a year, and the same mathematician who can only work 35 hours a week and teaches three sections of freshman calculus every semester. The difference in available research hours is staggering. The former flourishes and the latter stagnates.

As I wrote in Gravity Turn, the work of getting into orbit is categorically different from the work of staying in orbit. I propose that in a world where almost every PhD student is falling into the Half-a-Hero Trap, there are vastly superior models of skilling up - analogous to the Fat Newt build - that do not look like “imitate the nearest Fields Medalist.” Let me give two examples.

First, time management. Many students who are only capable of working 35 hours a week imitate the outward behavior of mathematicians who work 70. They go to the same number of seminar talks and conferences, spend the same amount of time teaching and grading, and attend the same number of departmental social activities. The well-meaning professor councils his student to attend five hours of class and five hours of seminars a week to broaden her horizons, oblivious to the sheer fraction of her meager productive hours this sucks up. I suspect this category of error is a font of bad decisions for graduate students.

Second, self-reliance. Just as the Cleaver Duelist may be able to jump into battle alone and mow down his enemies (though even for him this is a dangerous gamble), great mathematicians are often cast as lone geniuses, operating far outside of the capacity and understanding of their peers. Fat Newts, on the other hand, operate best in the middle of the fighting line, holding key positions and working in tandem to control and overwhelm important targets that they would be unable to handle alone. There is a whole separate post to be written about this, but briefly, I think that PhD training systematically overlooks building the skills needed to play a supporting role in a research team.

I must end on a sobering thought - even in the best-case scenario, the Fat Newt style is not a magic bullet that makes every recruit useful. In Battle Brothers, only one in ten brothers are generated with the stats to become an acceptable Fat Newt. My observation is that there are many graduate students, who are not generationally talented, who can only genuinely work 10 or 20 hours a week, if that. For them, I see no clear path forward.