Never get into a fight that you can’t win. How? Have one beggar brother striped totally naked and put all the rest in reserve. The beggar marathon runner can often outrun the enemies. If he can’t, just hit the retreat button and deal with a little injury for just one man. The point of this is that you can always pick which battle to fight. This is especially important in the early game, as you can actually find a lot of contracts that don’t require fighting. For example, if a merchant tells you to “obtain x item at y location”, this usually means that you can just go in with your marathon runner, retreat and then finish the mission.