You could always NOT take on a whole group of guards. You can stay and fight them, or you can run and try to lose them, hide somewhere, throw a smoke bomb to distract them, dive into a canal and stay under water until they lose track of them, etc.

If you're determined to stand there and fight until everyone's dead just because you can, though, you still can. But if that's not what you want to do but you do it anyway, that's definitely a problem with you and not the game.