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This is a long one but it's a good mix of combat and lore using the charisma skill and I want to breeze through Teron quickly.
So here's what happens if you don't have the smarts to pick up on Feng's bs. He scams you.
I still kill Cassius just because how can you say no to a kind old dear like Feng? Above you can see me forgetting I used all my bolts in the opening vignette and having to resort to slowly puncturing Cassius to death with a dagger Brutus got somewhere.
Return to Feng and you get scammed again. This time I'm enraged because it turns out you have to get scammed to get to the portion of dialogue with the charisma check.
tfw charisma 
I like that he teaches you how to scam people.
I finally buy the schematics I need and create my greatest masterpiece: 4 custom hand crossbows that go in every slot. When you get good enough at xbows you can basically pick someone at the start of a fight and obliterate them.
Time to test these babies out
Stupid thieves think they can do whatever they want.
Oh ya and I made custom armor.
I don't like this game when it gets cute.
You learn pretty quick that Guardsmen don't fuck around.
You may have noticed the awkward 5 points in strength at stat creation. Strength has no influence on xbow damage. But you need 5 so this guy doesn't call you a wimp and tell you to fuck off. Feels suboptimal man.
You also learn pretty fast that the Guardsmen are a bunch of assholes.
Highly advanced raider disguise, no one will ever recognize Brutus.
This fight pits you 3v5 against a merchant and some guards. The merchant is a non-entity but things can get problematic fast if the guards overwhelm your "raider" buddies.
Brutus focuses on attacking from the flanks and scavenging kills for + body count. The fight ends when one of Brutus' allies caves in the merchant's skull with his hammer.
You know the faction you're joining is fucked when a NPC in AoD considers the faction beneath them.
Diapermen fiesta.
Apparently there was more fighting elsewhere. These recruits have learned the taste of blood and gone feral.
Surprise and welcome to this noob trap! You show up here with whatever damage you took in the last fight, get beat up and don't have a healing salve and this fight will be fun. The Guards are really a bunch of assholes.
It's not hard to maneuver these guys into killing eachother, but much to his shame Brutus has to switch out one of the xbows in his quad xbow offense for a net so he could net the last guy standing and finish him off at point blank range.
Brutus is a soldier now. He doesn't feel like one.
The IG seller has only one important item
This freaking sweet wolf hat. Brutus does a little pose when no one is looking.
Lets go visit Antidas. Julius snuck in. How will Brutus do it?
I've seen a lot of people defend Antidas as not being a subhuman moron. If this doesn't convince you that he is one I don't know what will.
This is the only way of sneaking in where you still have to do Dellar's bs afaik, but at least you get the bonus SP and reputation.
Lets skip that crap and get to the charima stuff
tfw charisma And now you know why someone capable like Dellar serves a loser like Antidas.
Brutus is unsure how anyone saw through his disguise.
I love that killing people doubles as a social skill.
bla bla bla Antidas shit lets get to the charisma check stuff
Fuck Antidas.
Still one more Dellar quest. When you talk to him he mentions the Aurelians have to be getting food to sustain occupying the mines from somewhere.
I love that killing people doubles as a social skill.
You can: make your own poison, buy some poison, or if you're an assassin get some poison from your guild mate alchemist. The different poisons have different potency.
The alchemist merchant's poison is more than good enough if you pass the persuade check.
I also invest in alchemy to make my own poison to poison xbow bolts with.
Brutus has a weird skill set of "walking up to people and instantly killing them" and "killing people from far away with xbows." They don't synergize very well.
This is probably one of the hardest fights in the whole game if you approach it without poisoning them all and without instantly killing one of the leaders. But if you prepare for it it's much easier. You can see the poison did a lot of work already, decreasing the enemies' starting hp by quite a bit.
Julius starts by unloading on the crossbowman, killing him. That's the first big threat down.
You can see the gimmick of this build starting to kick in here. Crits ignore all armor. Even the lowly hand xbow can do a lot of damage with crits. Once you're able to crit reliably you start using barbed ammo exclusively. Barbed ammo does 1.2x damage, but checks DR three times. But if you're ignoring all armor by critting you just do massive damage from the 1.2x damage bonus and crit damage bonus piling on. It's sort of like a wizard build, you suck at level 1 but at level 20 you kill everyone by yourself.
Julius spends the rest of his time poisoning the remaining enemies at range and walking away from the while they die from poison.
And that's how, through the power of preparation and using consumables like poison, you make a really difficult fight into a real easy one. This is why it drives me insane when people say things like "Age of Decadence combat is impossible, everyone should just try to avoid it." Maybe don't man up on an outpost full of elite Aurelian troops in a completely optional encounter and expect it to be easy?
Also diapermen and cool black wolf hat.
Still not actually done though. There are more men inside. If you leave they heal up and erect barricades outside that you have to fight through to get in.
Julius gets a few turns to get in ranged attacks, but he actually rolls poorly and the enemies get on top of him.
That's what napalm is for. Except the game bugs out and that one guy gets trapped because the other enemy that got moved moved where he was going to move. Actually never seen that before.
Whatever Brutus kills them all through poison attrition and crits anyway.
And there you go, again. Use items and your brain and even when you get unlucky AoD combat will be more than doable.
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