I noticed that the game was on sale, so decided to finally pick it up. I assume that my experiences are fairly typical - mining chunks of iron and copper, stripping the dead from any fights between factions for equipment to equip and/or sell.
Finally got up to 3,000 credits, netting me a second character. Just for fun, I decided to lure a guard from a bandit camp that’s near the outpost I’m operating from. I figured - “hey, two on one; how bad can this be?”
Bad. The answer is bad. It turns out that two dudes who barely know which end of the sword is supposed to be pointing at the enemy aren’t able to even scratch a competent opponent before he slashes them both to death.
There's one thing that is different in Kenshi than in most other games, that I always tell new players off since it's such a departure from gameplay usually goes: normally, if you lose a fight in a game, you lose the game and have to reload. In Kenshi, losing fights is how you get stronger. As long as you live to walk, or crawl, away, this is how your characters gain experience. I think, though I'm not super sure on this last bit, that the bigger the difference between you and your foe in skill, the more experience you gain from fighting them.
The only danger is losing limbs while you are still early game poor (they can replaced once you have money, but it might be hard to come by in the beginning). The Starving Bandits make for excellent foes at the start because of this, since they only or mostly carry blunt weapons and the risk of limb severance is very low.
It might also be a good idea to practice keeping one character out of the fight, so that they can run up afterwards and bandage up the people who got their butt's kicked.
But in the end, what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.