Unless you spend points on the soldier class, you're almost certainly going to start off with terrible combat stats in a rise start so you're going to be mostly reliant on your followers in combat for quite awhile. Combining that with Ironman really makes the game brutal since you're going to constantly have whoever your main combat followers are dying permanently. That means unless you want to eventually just kill off all the uniques you're going to have to train up a constant supply of random scrubs to just toss into the meat grinder. There is no amount of gear or training that will ever allow you to avoid deaths in an iron man game unless you just never fight anything dangerous.
Personally, for a Rise start I prioritize the traits and don't take any skill classes at all. You can train up stats. You can't add traits mid game other than the master traits. I did try an ironman game for awhile but I found it annoying not to ever be able to take any of my best people into combat. I was curious to see how often people became incapacitated rather than dying outright. The answer is that even in the best armor they usually just die. Since it's not uncommon for the enemy to crit for up to 100 or so you would need armor with soak value close to double what Hulk armor has to be able to reliably avoid deaths.
