Spatial
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Influence Maps
Pathfinding tells an entity how to reach a destination. It doesn’t tell the entity which destination is worth reaching. An influence map fills that gap: a second grid, the same dimensions as your tile map, where each cell holds a numeric value representing some property of that location — how dangerous it is, how much of the area a faction controls, how recently the player passed through.
The guard doesn’t need to pathfind to every tile to know that standing in the open near the player is a bad idea. It reads the influence map, finds the cell with the highest “danger” value, and moves away from it. Spatial reasoning without exhaustive search.