It sounds like your current strategies are mostly adapted to the sorts of problems found in textbooks or homework assignments—problems which are “easy” in some sense. Such problems are typically already expressed in an ontology which reduces the search-space to something reasonably small, so just listing everything, forward-chaining, and back-chaining will probably be enough. In a large search space in which solutions are rare, those methods do not have the big-O efficiency to work.
That said, many of those methods are still necessary steps even on questions with larger search spaces—for instance, visualizing the main objects in the problem.
It sounds like your current strategies are mostly adapted to the sorts of problems found in textbooks or homework assignments—problems which are “easy” in some sense. Such problems are typically already expressed in an ontology which reduces the search-space to something reasonably small, so just listing everything, forward-chaining, and back-chaining will probably be enough. In a large search space in which solutions are rare, those methods do not have the big-O efficiency to work.
That said, many of those methods are still necessary steps even on questions with larger search spaces—for instance, visualizing the main objects in the problem.