Survival in the Colony comes down to reading attacks and refusing fights you cannot win yet. The Nameless Hero starts weak, and most early deaths happen because a player swings into a group instead of peeling enemies off one at a time. This page covers the melee fundamentals, the parry timing that makes hard fights manageable, and how to set up the One-Handed Combat skill that the parry depends on.
Melee fundamentals
Every melee weapon has a Strength requirement before you can equip it, and bows have a Dexterity requirement. Raise both stats with 
Diego in the Old Camp by spending Learning Points; an early target of roughly 20 Strength and 20 Dexterity opens up most starter gear and lets you trade blows with tougher, higher-XP enemies.
Before you can fight reliably, lean on ranged attacks. A bow lets you chip an enemy down before it reaches you, which is often the difference between a clean kill and a reload. The 
Shortbow is a free early option: hand the 
Hunter's Knife to 
Drax and he gives it to you.
Save before any fight you are unsure about. The game has quicksave and quickload, and combat in the early hours is unforgiving.
Learning One-Handed Combat
One-Handed Combat is the core melee skill and the gateway to parrying. You learn it from 
Scatty, who is found in the arena in the Old Camp. The first upgrade costs 10 Learning Points and 50 Ore and raises the skill to the Trained level.
Trained One-Handed is enough to cover the early game; pushing toward Master is a longer-term investment. Beyond smoother, faster swings, the skill unlocks parry and riposte, combos and finishers, and knockback options on certain weapons.
Blocking and parrying
Parrying is not available until One-Handed Combat reaches the Trained level. Once it is, the parry is purely a matter of timing the block button against the enemy's swing.
- Press block exactly on the moment the attack lands to parry it.
- Press too early and you get an ordinary block instead of a parry.
- Press too late and you eat the full hit.
A successful parry blocks all of the incoming damage and staggers the attacker for a few seconds, which is your window to counterattack freely. Maces add another option once you are Trained: an underhand swing can knock an enemy down.
Until you reach Trained One-Handed, you can only block, not parry, so do not count on a perfect-timing defense during your first hours in the Old Camp.
When to fight and when to avoid
The single most important habit is to never charge a group. Pull enemies one at a time and deal with them individually instead of getting surrounded.
- Lure dangerous enemies toward armed camp guards and let them fight for you. The catch is that you normally earn no XP for kills another NPC makes.
- Escort NPCs are the exception: you keep the XP for enemies they kill while escorting you, which makes escort quests a safe way to clear ground.
- Enemies do not respawn instantly, so an area you clear stays clear for a while. Some reappear after several in-game hours, letting you farm without forcing a chapter change.
If a fight is going badly, retreating to a guard or an escort companion is a legitimate tactic, not a failure. Saving the XP for kills you make yourself only matters once you can win the fight safely.