Group tactics utilizing suppression and shelter

In tactical games, a common strategy in squad movement has a portion of troops providing suppression fire while the rest of the squad advances to a new cover location safely. This represents a set of state changes as the entire squad moves towards the objective. The aim of this paper is to find the global optimal strategy where the total damage to the squad is minimized as they breach an objective. Traditional approaches to squad movement use greedy techniques and do not consider suppression fire. To better understand this problem and provide a firm foundation for other squad movement strategies that wish to employ suppression fire cover, we have developed a graph theoretic approach that solves for the globally optimal movement. We show that while this approach is PSPACE in terms of the number of cover locations, there are ways to mitigate this cost. We compare and contrast this approach to common greedy methods for squad movement, showing configurations where greedy algorithms fail. For this paper, we assume hardened targets.