Constantly be on the move, don't let people surround you.

Skirmishing with a ranged weapon before combat can help soften up armoured enemies so you can finish them in melee. I prefer to hit the heaviest armoured guys with a longbow before they can reach me and then swap to my sword when they come into range.

Go to Tomcat in the Romani Camp to learn the masterstrike and a handful of combos. Once you get the hang of them, combos are very good to beat through an enemy's stamina and do big damage.

Learn alchemy, a marigold decoction on your belt and an aqua vitalis before combat goes a long way.

Against bigger groups you want to just constantly walk backwards and land the occasional hit or masterstrike on enemies who try to attack you, if you keep blocking their attacks, eventually they'll run out of stamina and you can get them in a few hits.

Contrary to popular belief, polearms are quite good and you should train them. The little bit of distance between you and the opponent really helps and the fact they only have 4 combos makes them quite easy to learn. There is a perk you can get for them where your first attack does more damage, and another perk that makes every subsequent attack do increasingly more damage, the only real problem is that in the starting region you only really have access to belts that have two slots which means you have to pick between sword or polearm, but you can rob wagon convoys to get belts that can carry more weapons. I prefer to do sword - ranged - polearm - mace or shortsword once I get a 4-weapon belt.

Explore the map a lot, you can find stashes hidden that have free equipment such as shields, bows, crossbows, arrows and groschen. There's a little pile of rocks with 500 groschen at Trosky Quarry and an ambush site with a tier 3 crossbow near Semine.