So I was just remembering that when I started a few months ago without any clue I wasn't fighting anything for probably 2 weeks at least, neither did I have any points in UA or MC until I moved out of my noob base. The reason for this was that everything seemed very confusing and I couldn't bother deciphering it nor did it seem very necessairy. I probably read 2-3 guides and had to figure out which information was outdated and which wasn't plus I had no clue how strong I needed to be to not get killed by animals. I just had some vague memories how strong each animal was in comparision to eachother. Once I figured it out it wasn't too bad however. It was just a mess getting there and I think a lot of noobs might have the same problem
My idea is to add a very weak creature that you could beat with a bunch of punching and 1 UA, make it drop a small curio like those ant soldiers, this would want noobs to fight more of them and try to figure out how to fight them more efficiently (obv by increasing UA and getting a bit str/agi and more skills and reading up on skills)
This creature would be aggressive and starts attacking you so you have to fight back, however it's very very weak and should be really hard to get KO'd by, also you don't have many buttons to press, not so hard to figure out what works here
additionally I think it might be a good idea to just start with punch and your stance and this little creature would teach you your defensive maneuvers very quickly so you just need to understand one thing at a time, punch it a few times -> learn a maneuver, read what it does and add it to combat deck -> go fight more of them to get more skills and curios.
From then on it is probably a lot easier to understand the combat system and get ready for "normal" animals
For experienced players this is obviously completely unneccessairy except for curios in a new world but I think it gives new players a very good start to get into combat and how their deck works etc