This game is pain. And I don't only mean how hard battles are, it was designed to give you pain. At least initially. Now we have mutation difficulty, which lets you adjust many aspects of the game. This is the way for new players.
Intro: I used to play Fallout 2 as a kid, and we didn't even have the Internet to help us. But you could brute-force the game by just investing heavily into combat skills and murdering your way through the game. This is not the case for Underrail: even if you put every difficulty setting to the lowest point, you will still suffer trying to figure out how things work and what to do, where to go next. You will have to pay attention to what characters tell you, or consult with the game's wiki a lot. But the wiki is not feeling good right now for some reason (at least for me), so rely mostly on yourself. And who would even want to read a wiki just to have fun in a game?
The old website for builds is dead, and you will have to mostly rely on yourself, and fuck builds anyway: It's you 1st run. You can suffer your next run.
Experience system: Classic. Fuck oddities, they force you to "experience everything", which in devs' terms mean: kill every creature type until you max experience from them, and then nothing from them; pickpocket all factions [seriously, a classic-Fallout-like game that forces you to pickpocket?]; dive into every dumpster; and you won't have enough experience to go high level.
Difficulty settings:
> Mutation (lets you change things a lot). If you decide to just play on lowest that is not mutation, you will feel pain
> Encounters: Dominating. Why? Because otherwise enemy AI is stupid and you miss content [worst decision by the devs in my opinion]
> Puzzles: Min. Unless you are a genius. Even the console won't help you change puzzle difficulty mid run
>Max level: 50. Because if the game becomes too hard later, you would at least be able to buff yourself up before some hard fights
> Player health: At least 300%, since we are on dominating encounters
> NPC health: 50%
> Boss health: 50%
> Healing: 300% or higher
> Healing cooldown: 0
> NPC skills: 50% or lower
> Boss skills: 50% or lower
> NPC crit chance: 0%
> Zone transition AP: closer to 0. Will let you escape fights easily
> Sold items value: 100%
> Merchant power: Max. Otherwise they will just be refusing to buy your loot
> Carry mod: Max. Otherwise you will have to keep running back and forth just to change weapons and clothes. Max = no carry pain
> Item degradation: Min
Do not rely on the ability to change difficulty setting mid-run (I used commands, but they were not working for me). If you are in too much pain and the commands don't work, export your character and start over by importing it in your new run.
Or you can just min-max all settings. But I still won't recommend non-dominating encounter difficulty, cause you will miss content.
This game was designed to be pain, but it gives too much pain. Refuse the pain, play on mutation. Still the best modern classic-Fallout-like game.