You'll definitely spend most of your time in combat though, so you have to like the mechanics of it. You can minimize some unnecessary encounters by playing smart though, for example whenever you take over an important area like a port, town, mine, etc you always want to train militia to guard those places. Outputs and other enemy bases will send out patrols to take those areas back, so if you leave them undefended you'll have to fight some extra battles. But the nice thing is that you can 'auto resolve' battles with a dice roll to avoid fighting them, though you don't always have the ability