So what does this setting do? The biggest effect is on how long you can play before you need to pay your mercenaries. So at higher survival difficulty level, money is a lot tighter, which means you have less gold for food or gear. While this obviously somewhat affects the overall difficulty of the game, it also has a rather profound impact on the way you play: If money is tight, you need to do random quests more often. In some cases you might even be forced to farm refugee caravans, which are the easiest target in the game. In other words, higher survival difficulty level leads to more grind. Which is why in my game I put it to the lowest level.

Wartales seems to be a very popular game since its release; there are a lot of people on Twitch streaming it. And I noticed that some streamers set all the possible difficulty levels of Wartales to the highest level. That could be a matter of pride, or streamers figure that nobody wants to watch you playing a game in easy mode. However, I had the impression that for the survival difficulty in Wartales, that choice backfires: Streams of Wartales with high survival difficulty contain longer sequences of the streamer having to grind, and fewer sequences with story quests and boss battles, which are more interesting to watch. Grinding is bad enough if it is in your game, so it really doesn't make for very good entertainment when it is in the game of a streamer. So my recommendation to players and streamers of Wartales would be to only set combat difficulty to high, while setting survival difficulty to medium or low.