I've never got to the end, but as I understand it, there is a boss fight that is made easier by destroying them. I can't verify that personally, though. Yes, the Cursed Hounds are timed (paces) script events. Unavoidable.

1. There is no consequences for praying or destroying statues as far as I know. I suppose it is better to do constantly same thing to them. If you prayed for Yul once, you should pray every time.

2. Wolf is a random encounter.

Thank you for your answers.

without too much spoilers, till you kill the pack leader , much much later .

they spawn around every 5 days outside towns / dungeons or whaterver cave. you can slightly delay the encounter by changing maps (through portals for example) , but if you are confortable they are a good source of xp early.

still , try to avoid your frontlines characters to be cursed too often , because it costs money to remove the penalty : the more your characters gain lvls , the more it costs and unfortunatly the cleric learns this spell too late to be some use . Also their numbers & kind changes later , but it's easier.... like the rest of the game ,

I've learned from reading guides and such that this game is totally riddled with dead-end skills. It's unfortunate.

Also, Divine Summoner can basically major in two summons which you will need to decide on from the start. The only one who might be worth minoring in is Golot (the gold generation summon). If you spend points on two summons and randomly give one of the others a try mid-game, you'll find the under-leveled summon extremely disappointing.

Any skill that is going to become obsolete later shouldn't be maxed, and maybe not even learned at all. It's bad game design IMO, but they allow you to waste points that you can't ever get back. You might get away with some waste in Normal (the lowest difficulty), but I don't know if the higher difficulties are going to leave room for waste. It just feels bad to be so starved for skill points and to have all those junk skills showing up in your menu all the time to mock you...

From my experiences (bought on the sale here) I have complaints about the early game design. This is all on the medium difficulty, A lot of things require blind luck. For instance the Young Cursed Wolf. You have to basically roll the dice with them hoping that they won't target a mage with their lightning attack. Unless you've invested points into Con (and starving their important stats) it's an instant one hit KO. And since you don't get XP for KO'd characters, you pretty much have to reload. I had to replay the second Wolf battle multiple times, it would nuke my mage every single game.

If you're in Sporia Meadow (I think), you basically have to hope you don't run into one of the bigger mushrooms very often. If they get off their combo, they can just roll over the party. If you can't avoid them with Camo, you'd better hope you can avoid the Sleep/AOE cycle. I had one battle where there was nothing I could do. It'd Sleep, AOE, and then be next (or near next) in the turn order to get off Sleep again. Rinse, repeat until I had to reload.

That's something in general I dislike. I beat the Tower Sentinel using an absolutely asinine strategy. Why? Because his one-two combo of Confuse > AOE wiped out my party every single time within a round or two. I hope things like that vanish as the game goes on, at these lower levels it's pretty much impossible to avoid tactics like those, you can't reliably resist them and again, you have to rely on pure dumb luck and hope they don't get the combo off.

Despite my issues I'm still having fun with the game. I just wish it'd stop being such a prick to me.

As for the questions: Wolves are unavoidable. They'll hit you in areas with exploration & random encounters. I've had two so far, the second one being a nightmare.

I'm not sure on the statue, but as far as I'm understanding the storyline, Yul is the bad God trying to destroy everything. So it makes sense if you're Godot's herald to fight these influences that you'd destroy them to weaken his influence. Just my take on it.

Nope, that's true. I put CON up to 10 before going for EN. My mage never runs out since I haven't touched more than the enabling point into any of her spells. The Cleric, on the other hand runs out regularly PER FIGHT. Anything that inflicts bleeding (ravens, raptors, etc) will run me out of mana each battle. Depending on the party, I've done the Soniaras (and I forget the other big Mushrooms) as early as lvl 4. The party in question was the only one I've had such luck with. Anything else where I didn't pump SPD and CON like crazy, didn't last long. I kept getting nailed with nauseous status, which puts resistances to -20/-30 from the rats. It costs 150+ gold to remove in town. Since I regain it every few fights I stopped removing it. Skill points are more important than having normal resistances. Even Might and Magic 1 was more forgiving with the Diseased and Poisoned statuses which you yourself couldn't cure until you were ready to take on Ehrliquin and beyond. Main issue is that the game is limited. Limited random encounters, limited special monsters (except the Hounds) etc. You are also largely stuck with what you get from each area. No going back and farming for that rare Disintegration Ray for your archer like in MM1. If you didn't find good armor or enough cash to buy that good armor in town, when you can afford it, you won't find it. And it won't matter since skill is less important than luck, and luck can be compensated with constant reloads. I've started several parties and I can say that just from my original inputs, the game gets frustratingly hard merely because if you reload each fight until you breeze it, the game feels of tolerable difficulty. However, regardless how you organize your battles, sometimes, all your level 5 guys will miss those weasly Askary lowbie soldiers (just an example.) This would be the same party that one level later will actually survive against the town guards with only 1 or 2 shuriken per fight. It isn't just you. More on this below. Wolves aren't so bad. As for Energy vs Con, you can easily get away with that. What I'm finding wrong is the absolutely low accuracy of your characters, and the fact that both gold and food YOU WILL run out of. I killed the guards fairly early in the first town, and navigated the fungus maze in Sporia as early as I could reliably kill the random encounters enough to get to it. The Ogre is still out of my reach at Lvl 5/6 party, the wolves have thus attacked 3 times and been easier each time. I am running a ranger, sold, paladin, thief, mage, cleric party, very standard old school and VERY effective, even against ravens early on, try to find some energy or "POWER" items to put on soldier, and learn aura of protection on paladin at 4... essential for bigger fights.

With that said, the absolute randomness of this game makes it feel like Nethack with insane loading times (I'm playing on my portable machine on the road more than at home) and with annoying luck based everything but absolutely limited options if you screwed up a skill. Unlike, say, Wizardry or Might and Magic, its not the unforgiving difficulty that upsets me, its the fact that it isn't "difficult" its all entirely based on luck. Sure Might and Magic 1 would occasionally throw you an unwinnable fight on your way home to the inn, or a trapped chest from some sprites in Sorpigal would kill your whole party when the thief randomly failed to open it at level 8 or 10 (midgame) but still... c'mon... one fight, my whole group can just click FIGHT and hit with every weapon at random, and another, all my front liners using attack skills with a few ranks in 'em can't hit the very self same soldiers as before and GET SLAUGHTERED.

This is less about skill and more about luck. At that point it becomes annoying and I Alt F4 and go hunt Sheltem or try to kill Werdna. Hell even Nethack is less frustrating than having to reload every time something goes wrong in Xulima all because the RNG sucks. (Though I noticed even with Bard songs lvl 4 or 5's I've got in stock to use on tougher fights, I can still go through a round of MISSING every single attack on a relatively "balanced" or "easy" fight.)

So I hate to say this, but for me, this game is a total MISS. I'll probably put in for a refund if the frustrations don't relieve by the time this party (far more successful and far more treasure and store contents luck than all my past ones since I bought it a week ago), since the gorgeous graphics and excellent weather and lighting animations alone won't hack it for me. It was a tossup between FTL and Xulima, both being on sale.

You can offset bad luck with +Resist gear, as it also decreases chances to get bad status effects.

I agree on characters' accuracy though: with all blessings and bard song, with investing in weapon skill each level up, characters still miss very often. On low levels if my Mage and Bard happen to run out of mana, there is just NO WAY of killing stuff. Blessings are also super-expensive for the amount of gold you get (a lot of early monsters don't drop anything or drop very insignificant gold), so it means farming cereals, which gets boring very fast.

But it will be much better later on, you will get way to receive permanent blessings, you will get nearly infinite healing (if you have Cleric) and so on. Just can't screw character builds, because you can raise skills only by 1 point per level (unless you got lucky with skill book drops).

When you sneak past the ogre NW of town, you reach a transporter and some grindable enemies. To the East, Nabros Forest is pretty grindy, and some more grind areas open up after Nabros Castle. After Nabros, you can find chances to breeze through a lot of Balanced or Easy encounters.

Prior to these, there is a pretty rigid sequence of areas that you can clear 100% each without ever feeling all that leveled up. It's definitely a slow start, and you do have to resurrect your back line after a bad wolf encounter. I also discovered that Shuriken (Thief only) makes a night-and-day difference in some encounters if your enemies bleed. Max the skill and hoard as many as you can find.

I got everyone up to 10 recently on Veteran (middle difficulty). By this point, your back line doesn't get one-shot all the time, and a Mage can stack large amounts of Burn. This is also around the time that you can actually spend skill points on things that aren't going to go completely obsolete. I don't know how bad the next monster toughness spike is going to be, though. I'm afraid to find out.

I'm really not liking how you have a 60-70% hit chance and the next weapon upgrade has a penalty to hit chance. I usually end up buying it and just letting it sit in my inventory...

There are no big difficulty spikes and cereal walls after that point. All hardest stuff is in the beginning (unless you neglect Gaulen's skill which reduces food consumption).
You are speaking about side upgrades, not direct upgrades. Each weapon type has several subtypes, all of which has same accuracy bonus (penalty). Weapon subtypes with accuracy penalties deal more damage (when connect) than those with accuracy bonus. All weapons of same subtypes are direct upgrades of each other.