It's not exactly novel (and not exactly foolproof, either) but I have usually levelled up my sneaking and throwing while alone in the wilderness, so my more physical attack methods are always quite a bit lower and which of those I end up resorting to (including plain old wrestling moves) depends a lot on what I'm currently trying to get a result out of, modified by how scared I currently am of the enemy(/ies) involved.
So, I throw the usual assortment of bagged (or grabbed from the ground) stones and vomit and whole corpses and whatever other rubbish I am able to utilise (that isn't going to be useful as actual armour or hand-held weaponry) until the enemy goes unconscious (or until the last significant enemy is unconscious, when there's multiple allies-of-target, or just multiple generic auto-hostiles, in the same location) then I go in for whatever random mêlée attack strikes me as useful. "Useful" depends on whether I'm looking for immediate effectiveness (especially while attempting to quickly dispatch one unconscious member of a target group so that I can stop them waking up and revealing my location to the others) or if I want to practice wrestling-holds or some other form of non-fatal torture in a more long-term manner (according to time-to-spare/boredom-threshold and of course any chance of being discovered red handed, or whatever colour they'd be with the given targets particular brand of oozing ichor on them).
Being discovered too early usually leads to me trying to get behind the nearest tree/tunnel bend and re-sneaking, but occasionally I have to fight, and sometimes (especially when I was hunting or just generally practising combat on wildlife) I now need to actually give chase as I'm being fleed from. Not done enough Adventuring in the newer versions of .31.x to know if this is still the case, but more than once a specifically quested-for bandit chief seems to have done a runner while I was still dispatching the peripheries of his entourage, and I've had to Travel away and back again and sometimes have never actually found him and so just moved onto the next nearest major figure that I'd essentially accepted the no-payment bounty on. (This, in particular, is why I like to quickly incapacitate and then kill some auxiliary targets, first, any pretensions to swordsmanship/whatever be darned.)
But not doing so as much Adventuring, recently, I've a feeling I'm thinking in an outmoded method.