I have to disagree that because town A has combat town B requires it implicitly. They combat should be added to enhance the flow/pacing and be woven into the story/quests.
Honestly though - if I have, for example, five major towns to visit and they each have long involved questslines which have utterly no action involved I'll personally fall asleep in my chair. Sure, this is *me* - but I suspect I'm far from alone.
Also - your point about playstyle makes little sense to me. Are you saying that the folks who want to be passive shouldn't have combat forced upon them? Ok.. that would be a strange stance to take considering this is billed as a tactical turn-based combat RPG. Additionally there could very easily be non-violent outcomes to some confrontations.
All of this is pure opinion of course - but hours of playing Columbo without a single scuffle is utterly snooze-worthy to me and thus I agree completely with the original post and subsequent supporting posts which call for suitable and story-driven moments of action to occur after the 1st orc battle and before my head hits the keyboard hours later.
