It's a Tes5Edit script to generate a patch for your load order, and a little advanced to tweak and set up compared to just hitting the 'download with manager' button, but very customizable, effective, and lightweight. Grimy Combat Patcher, which is 100% script free. Since I learned about this I've been building a new combat setup and what I've come up with so far is a combination. Many people love it and use it without issue, but I 1) don't care for it 2) have experienced major AI glitches with it and 3) can't use it in my (admittedly heavy) load order. But it is VERY script heavy (I don't like that term because it's over used, over simplified, and misleading).

Ultimate combat does not cause save bloat.

See this link for more (and it's a very good resource, I stick to this list as a base because the people who post under it and the guy who wrote it are much much smarter than me) The issue has been acknowledged by the author of Deadly Combat, not Duel, and Action is inactive, but basically they all do the same thing.

Which is why, even though I'm a long time Deadly combat lover and it hurts to say, you should NOT use any of these mods on a character/save you want to use for any length of time or a real playthrough. In the end, a save with save-bloat causing mods is doomed to instability, sooner or later. Once your save file gets above a certain point it has difficulty loading, difficulty executing scripts, and eventually crashes. At first you won't notice anything but depending on the severity of the buildup it can slowly or quickly get out of control.

Save bloat means that over time references begin to pile up because a mod doesn't clean up after itself and even though you aren't using this stuff it gradually makes your save file bigger and bigger as things pile up. I really, really hate to break this to you, but it's recently come out that Duel, Action, and Deadly Combat all have an issue with the way they apply effects which causes save bloat.

Skyrim nexus ultimate combat