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Playing on Easy Mode it's possible to complete all quests of the game (main AND side quests) and find all areas with 126 fights or less (yes I counted ). At Easy level, even if that number seems high, most of the fight are quite quickly over, provided that the party is built well enough. If one chooses to not succeed in or do all sidequests (e.g. Riley's quest can be failed right at the first fight with no game over) the number drops even lower...but with the expense of not getting to read some of the story. On the other hand, sometimes (deliberately) failing in a quest will give you something different to read (eg, try failing at either fight in Vaelis' quest). Anyways, I thought I'd post available "shortcuts" or non-violent options for completing the quests here...while still getting to read most of the story. Maybe someone somewhere will find this useful, lol. Act 2 requires more fights than any of the other chapters and also has the least options to avoid them. Quest choices in spoilers.

Note that while avoiding fighting might still work on Normal difficulty as well, I don't recommend this level of fight-avoidance on Hard or NM level. For faster fights in general the key is to invest into aggressive traits and points and have both heavy single enemy attacks and row attacks available. Imo, druid + hunter is the easiest twin combo to play (healing + heavy hits when needed), but that's just my opinion.


Act 1
+When going East of Ninim, give all your money to the bandits (shop first, but you need to have some money for them to let you go --- they let me pass on easy level with just 4gold, lol, but 0 will make them attack)

Available quest shortcuts:
Secret Formula (enter the cave the first time at frozen woods): Animal Problem Polar Bear Hunting Quest caution!!!
Bandits stealing pelts

Haha interesting. I'm thinking to steal this an post on Steam forums too

Act 2

+Avoid the Lugal area when you don't have to go there due to a quest. It's the only area you can't just walk back out but will have to fight all the mercs first.
+Apart from the Invitations quest, you always risk a fight when you exit a Dingirra family area. Save and reload if you really want to avoid these.
+The Master of the Pits will be after your money on two days: On the day you go adventuring with Krimm the first time and on the last day you get off to buy weapons just before the Liberty Challenge. Blow all your money (or almost all) before entering the arena on those two days to get the related achievement.
+After returning back to the arena on your first Dingirra adv. day with Krimm, you'll face a quest with 0 to many arena slave fights before a Boss. You can try your luck or use saving and reloading. I managed to clear this out with only two slave fights by just reloading a save when I saw the two guys in the cell (they always attack and have no info for you)
+ On Riley's Quest there are 7 guard fights and 1 Boss. You'll get a level-up after 3 fights. There's no shortcut here except trying the stunts (and reloading after failed stunts if you really don't want to fight). You can always lose a fight, but you'll then fail the quest.

Available quest shortcuts:
Memories Family slave day --- Kiduu-quest
Other family quests might be shorter than this, but I like the Kiduu-reward the most. ( Family-quest rewards are listed in here: Legendary Usables - Quick Reference )You can cut some corners in the dungeon, but you'll lose some exploring fun this way...anyway "short" route: Steam Tunnels
These tunnels can be cleared by just using the steam-path shortcuts twice and then fighting the Boss (easy), but you'll miss a bit of dialogue. Best for immersion would be to Quest Caution!!
Ant Queen

Act 3

+Autolevel everyone to 14 at the start of this Act, it should make the first quest, Merrow's Men, which is one of the longest quests in this chapter easier to complete.
+There's a secret area in this Act that you'll need for the Explorer-achievement. To find it: Available shortcuts
Lost Brother Empire's Plans Pride of Lukoss Lost Parents War or Peace Nutty Nutt's Treasure

Act 4
+ Autolevel to 21
+ Make sure you have at least 5000 worth gold and items to sell if you don't want to do random fights to gather enough money to pay the toll later.
+ Collecting flowers and rhino horns is optional => 0 fights

Centaurs! Minotaur Canyon Poor Hulius ****
Final note:
Excessive and fast reloading of saves to get better random events may induce a not-so-common RenPy-crash. Annoying, but not fatal, because you were loading something you had a save for, anyway.
Not all quests have shortcuts, obviously. Sometimes you just have to fight. Number of fights I did on this trial to complete all quests (Save Chalassa and Vaelis' quest in Act 3) for each Act: 20 + 54 + 40 + 12. Achievements:
Tainted Love, All About Money, Save Chalassa, The Worst Pirates, Treasure Hunter, Adventurer, Explorer, It's Ratman!
Throwing in a few extra random grind fights without Shea & Althea and excluding them from a few storyline fights would've also earned the This Is Our Story!- achievement.

Please notify me if I typed anything horribly wrong.

jack1974 wrote:Haha interesting. I'm thinking to steal this an post on Steam forums too

Lol, steal away.

For comparison purposes, completing Loren with extension and acquiring the following list of achievements ("pacifist-options" used whenever possible, eg in Karen's and Loren's personal quests, didn't fight Krul, etc)
Free Karen, Vanquished, Formidable, Champion of Orcs Arena, Bad Company, King Slayer, It's Personal, Let's Party, Undeceivable, Animalist, one char romanced/alone, reach 50 points x 3
... took around 101 fights. Go back and forth with few paths, add 2-5 fights and achievements Van Helsing & Diamond Hunter could be added. I got lucky with the Everburn fights and had to fight only twice. No reputation quests done and all random fights skipped. LtAP of course has no separate 'all quests'-done achievement nor does SotW have a cheat-button, so direct comparisons are a bit difficult, but I thought I'd log that anyway.

Interesting, so are you saying that trying to play both games using the least fights possible, with Loren you got around 101 and with SOTW 126?
Then probably wasn't really the number of battles (even if the average player doesn't exactly know all the shortcuts you used) but something else. To be honest, sometimes everything seems just a bit random

Yeah, I played both games on Easy with lowest possible number of fights I could think of while acquiring as many achievements/quests done as possible. (playing on easy will of course exclude all hard-mode related stuff/bosses)

ETA: I guess one thing that makes Loren's fights look so much less is that the personal quests that you have to specifically look out for, take about 22 fights, so people can skip a lot of those if they are not interested in a specific character, whereas in SotW the personal quests are integrated into the storyline so people will fight to win? Pure speculation here, though.

It might also be the overall difficulty - for someone like you or me, used to RPG, Loren's hard difficulty could be considered "normal", while SOTW easy difficulty for Loren's players might be "hard"