Combat is turn-based on a text map, resolved on d20 rolls, and it will be familiar to anyone who has played a tabletop game. If you have not: you roll a twenty-sided die, add what your character is good at, and try to beat a number.
How a fight runs:
Nothing here rewards fast fingers. There is no aiming, no dodging by reflex and no combo you can drop. It rewards knowing the rules, bringing the right gear, and picking fights you can win.
Your gear takes damage every time, and repairing it is one of the biggest ongoing bills in the game. Fighting costs money, and it is the reason smiths have customers. A character who fights constantly and never sells anything goes broke slowly, which is a real thing that happens to real players.
Drop to zero and you are unconscious, not dead. You roll a save at the start of each of your turns. Enough of them go your way and you stabilise; enough go badly and you die. A very good roll puts you back on your feet by yourself.
This is the same rule against a player as against a monster. Somebody standing over you can finish it, and it costs them an action to do, which is exactly enough time for the rest of your side to do something about it.
Getting hit while you are down makes it worse, and a blow struck from arm's reach is worse still.
If your side loses the fight outright, the rolling stops. The winners take what is on the ground and the dead go back to a graveyard. Everything about being saved assumes somebody on your side is still standing.
You hold your nerve because you are the one holding the phone. Nobody else on your side has that luxury. Hirelings, retainers, a garrison on your wall, a company you raised and paid: when a fight goes badly enough, they roll to see whether they keep standing there, and sometimes the answer is no.
Losing a quarter of them is enough to ask the question. So is losing whoever was giving the orders, or being surrounded, or being asked to walk at a wall that already threw you off it once. Troops who have not eaten ask it at a disadvantage.
Breaking is not dying, and it comes in degrees. Shaken men fight worse. Wavering men give ground. Routed men leave, and what happens to them after that is between them and whoever is chasing.
A banner in sight steadies them, and a banner is a real object that can be taken off the field. So do walls, so does having won together before, and so does the right sort of officer. A leader can spend their own turn dragging a broken unit back into line, which is the point in a battle where somebody decides what kind of commander they are.
Player-versus-player is real and consequential, with rules that keep it from becoming a bully's game:
For structured, sport-rules PvP there is the Arena: tiers, circuits, and exhibitions from launch. It is where you test yourself without the open world's stakes.
Two paths (the Reaver and the Inquisitor) turn sustained killing into a reputation and a set of rewards, the killstreak game. It is powerful, watched by anti-feeding rules, and it makes the frontier dangerous in an interesting way.
Playing: The Economy · Guilds, Charters & Territory · The Sea · Tournaments
Always: Mortmain · Start Here · Reference