Switching tactics definitely helps a great deal. I'm trying to avoid character deaths until I reach the lighthouse fight, and after several instances where it seemed death was unavoidable, I banged my head against the wall until I worked out a strategy.
That does not mean that the game in its current state is balanced, though. Poison and burning status effects do an excessive amount of damage, it's absurd, and is essentially a one-shot kill on some of my full-health characters (even with 6 and 7 CON) before I can do anything about it. Most of my strategies revolved around using status effects to disable enemy archers before they could use their arsenal of nuclear arrows.
For the house on the western cliff, I had to go with Steamcloud Arrow + Blitzbolt to disable the archers.
Different class types and combinations also have different levels of effectiveness against the mostly skeleton force you'll be facing in Cyseal. It doesn't help that because of the vendor spell selection issue, there are skills which I can afford and use, but are not available because the vendor chooses not to sell them.
It's not simply a case of "u just suck, git good".
