If you haven't already go to one of the training yards and spear to trainer, complete all the fights and you will gain some experience, stay away from ice, hills in Rhodock country, sea in Nord and Vaegir, Desert in anywhere
Essentially early game looters, or very very very small parties (if you have more and better experienced troops) are your only and best choice, never / rarely get mercenary troops, cost too much for too little.
Try to stick to places like Praven if struggling, due to only looters being around there, also Dhirim has looters and maybe a few forest bandits thrown in. Looters are scum of the bandits and if you get a blunt weapon eg club knocking them out and selling them in taverns to ransom brokers is a nice way to get a little bit of money, hire any man hunters you can. Enterprises is the way I tend to play my game and once you farm up 10k from slave trade after a few weeks normally 20 in game my dye works has paid itself off and giving me 500$ a week! During that 20 in game weeks keep slave trading for heaps more profit and always always always read! when asking the towns guild master (can be found by walking around the street) make sure it is profitable to get that business, dye works at most towns get you ~500 income a week but some give close to 0.
When it comes to picking weapons the reason you haven't got any prisoners:
1 - Make sure you have prisoner skill leveled up
2 - Make sure troops and or you are using blunt weapons, you can see when looking at a melee (non ranged) weapons characteristics you will see swing, thrust and these are just the movement you can perform, to the right of that you will have a number and a letter after it, for example 25p This means that it is 25 piercing damage, there are other types of damage like b = blunt, c = cut.
Hope it helps, good luck! Also I might have read wrongly but would changing your in game keys help at all?