It's not that you skipped a tutorial, it's that the
game is missing a tutorial. For a system that's as complex as this one, it's quite maddening. I'll try to summarize the answers to these questions.
Out of combat: you can use the skills menu (X) to put points into various skills to unlock and improve them, and equip them on the bar at the top of the window. You can use the ones you equip in combat; they show up at the bottom of the screen then.
Gear are the series of slots at the top of the inventory menu (I). If you put items (like bandages etc.) in those slots you can use them in combat.
Once in combat, there are two resources you spend to execute your actions:
Action points (AP) - Shown by the white number at the bottom right corner of a character on the map, these are spent to move around and make basic attacks.
Stamina - Some stronger attacks cost Stamina points as well, which regenerate slowly and are shown on the yellow bar at the bottom of the screen.
Targeting limbs: You can right click on a character to see a little schematic doll of them, and hovering over one of the hit locations will show the details of what maiming that limb does, as well as its current HP and defense. This is particularly useful because the effects are different per enemy, and some enemies have hit locations that may not be obvious from just looking at them. Also has a percentage for bleed damage which seems to be the ratio at which damage taken by the limb is applied to that foe's main health bar.
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Strength tokens: Increase the damage dealt by the character that has them. The description's vague, so I'm not sure by how much.
Weak tokens: Decrease the damage dealt by the character that has them.
In general there are a variety of status effects that can affect characters, and you can hover the mouse over them on the map to see a brief description, which is not always helpful.
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Enemies, rather than having to spend resources for their attacks, have a "deck" of attack cards that determines what moves they execute and when. Interacting with it is unfortunately pretty fiddly and often unrewarding, and the game doesn't explain anything about what "exhaust" does vs. "discard". As far as I can tell, discarding removes the card from the stack temporarily, as if it had been used, meaning that they'll get it back when run out of cards, but it can stall a high priority attack.
My quick tips for combat are:
- The basic "Slash" attack the MC has is actually quite good, particularly once you get Swiftness to be able to hit with it twice in one round.
- Use Samara. At least in the current version, she seems noticeably less incomplete than the other companions, and her reach is often useful.
- Focus fire when you can, to take down a single limb or single character at a time.
- Skip if you have to, especially during Whispering Bandits dungeon because despite being quite beatable it's just so damn long.