This game is very close to the "perfect game" I envisioned in my head after reading very early hype material for the "Tabula Rasa" mmo way back when.

Ever since then, faction warfare and the chance of factions taking over areas they are fighting over has been a gaming kink for me.
Kenshi has this and more. It also has its flaws (a lot of them), but the core concept is there and it makes the less functional bits easier to gloss over.

Much like Rimworld or Dwarf Fortress, this game is built on losses. Or rather, the story for your playthrough is built on losses. You are not expected to play perfectly. Instead, you are expected to get by, by the skin of your teeth.

In my first game I spent my starting money on food (I started as a Wanderer) and was forced to exit the safe haven of my starting settlement to look for ways to survive and get food or money, I got jumped by a band of starving bandits the very first day on the outside of the walls. They beat me to a pulp and stole my food.
I reloaded, and avoided them. This was my reaction after playing a whole lot of other games, where any small defeat is considered "wrong" and you load your previous save. This is also NOT the way I would approach Kenshi any more. I am not going to tell YOU how to play the game, but I would at least recommend going in mostly blind (perhaps look up some of the crafting stuff once you get to that point, since they're not explained intuitively in the ingame tutorials) and try to save-scum as little as possible.


You get beat up, but if it doesn't kill you, it will only make you stronger (well, tougher, but yeah).
The thing is, you want to get beat up, but just safely and without getting eaten or killed afterwards. You want to get some combat experience. Your character grows and learns every time they are doing any kind of action in the game. If they get beat up, then the next time they will be able to take more punishment (as long as they survive this fight).

Sometimes a character dies. That is ok. It is a major loss, especially if this was an important character to your party - BUT - this also makes the game so much more fun to play.

I don't think I've had this much fun playing an emergent RPG in years.
I've had an entire scouting party knocked out and robbed. I've had my pack animals butchered and eaten by bandits. I've had my upstart settlement sacked by 3 bandit factions at the same time, and then on top of it all they arrested my faction leader (my start character) and strapped her up on my own prisoner pole...
This last one was a real pickle to solve, but it's incredible what you can do with some lone survivors, a few thousand Cats and some mercenary groups. The stories you get from a loss is much more enjoyable than the stories you get from "smooth-sailing".

TLDR:
Anyway, point being, I absolutely love this game, despite its flaws (which I intentionally haven't mentioned here. If I mention the flaws now, you will look for them when playing and get a confirmation bias. If I don't mention them, you might not even think about it).
The emergent gameplay here is something very few games get right, and Kenshi is very close to getting it right.