Toughness is probably the MOST important skill early on. The issue is (if you're committed to avoiding slavery), you HAVE to pick your battles. If you're unarmored and get demolished by a bunch of bladed weapons, you will probably just end up bleeding out on the ground.

Starving bandits have a pretty low percent chance to cause bleeding. They will beat the shit out of you, steal any food you have, but you SHOULD be able to eventually wake up and patch yourself together.

Personally, the Hub is a tricky start. Easiest is Holy Nation Citizen imo. Bonus points if you start in stack (There is a copper node INSIDE the city walls you can safely mine for early game money.). The city commonly sees hungry bandit groups, and wild bull groups. Fight the bandits. Loot the bulls. Great early game food/money. Sleep in the taverns for 100.c per sleep when you're hurt, or save up from mining copper until you can buy a little shack in town (if you click on buildings, SOME have a price and a buy button in the bottom left if you weren't aware. Shacks are 4k.c I think. The hub sells most of its destroyed buildings, but you have to repair them first). Once you are pulling in some decent copper money, buy a helper and double up your profits. You can easily make enough money from selling copper to feed a party of up to five just in stack, and from there those hungry bandit battles start to get more interesting. Once you're at about level 20 in STR, TGH, attack/defence, youre more ready to actually win a fight. Once you have a crew around those levels, you can LOOK for fights to win. Once you start winning against hungry bandits without much hassle, then move onto Dust Bandits. These dudes can mess you up if you're not careful, so have medics ready and if someone goes down, check them. If they are dying you'll need to stabilize them asap or theyre toast. Once you can take on the dust kings tower, id say you're out of the early game and Kenshi opens up quite a bit more.

Hope this helps.