Yeah, something I noticed in recent times is that if your surgeon gets KOed during battle, I'm pretty sure their bonus IMMEDIATELY stops working. Looking at my wounded/dead ratio in battles where my surgeon gets hurt, it's not exactly consistent with other battles where I have them flee. Or I might just be unlucky.
Rebinding the key is indeed so it's easier to hit. I play WASD + mouse and 0 is quite a stretch.
I prefer to take Trade myself because you can get it to 4 (+1) at character creation (and IMO, you really don't need much more than that) and also because it saves me having to raise the charisma of any of my companions. On top of that, none of them starts with trade above 3. I'd rather just have them either go pure combat or pure intelligence. They just take too long to level up.
I might recommend picking up the book that gives you a free trade point as well (when your intelligence allows). Because of the way party skills for the leader work, this would raise it to 5 (+2). I know I just said you don't really need much more, but it's 2 free points, which is damn nice. If/when charisma allows, and it probably will, you can raise it more, but you probably won't need to.
Trainer is indeed a problem. The best you can do is max it out for whatever your intelligence is and buy the book that gives +1 trainer while you have it in your inventory. If you like you can raise intelligence more. I just prefer to make a character who becomes a beast in combat. It'd be good on companions, again, if companions leveled faster or started at a higher level. I really should just make an optional add-on for that, but I'm lazy and school is starting soon. On the other hand, if anyone wants to direct me to some fast and easy modding tools, I'll gladly release it.
As an addendum to intelligence, what you might want to do is raise it to 11 and then read the book (Essays on Logic) that gives you a free intelligence point. Then you can get Trainer to 4, plus 1 with the book. That's pretty good.
As this is Floris, make sure you have your intelligence-based companions read the intelligence book ASAP as well. In fact, it might be nice for everybody who's got the intelligence to read it, because a free skill point is very nice. In the early game, when you don't suffer much for sitting around, you can just buy a bunch of extra food and camp somewhere safe, preferably near a city or area with high lord traffic so you don't get raided at camp. Or you could just spend a little bit of money to stay in a town.
Sorry, I didn't mean for this to be so long but every time I think of one thing I think about 5 other things. I really like this game.
StrikeQ: I am not sure why your orders aren't working. IIRC, you need to press the "plan your battle with the enemy" button for every battle, click OK, and then "enough planning, to battle". If that isn't working, post in the support forum.
callahan9119: You really only need one character with each party skill, particularly if you tell them to stay out of battles. Most party skills are intelligence-based, so I prefer to let my companions handle all the intelligence skills so I can focus on combat earlier. I do get intelligence later though - like I said, 12 is nice eventually.
