I'm currently level 7 in my Tactician run, and much like Balanced, everything gets a lot easier when you hit level 5. Tav is one of the best starters (Bard) even if the rest of my party was kinda meh at low levels (Champion Fighter, Monk, CotL Druid). The martials are starting to take off now--especially the Monk--though I'm still not thrilled with the Druid. It's possible it would have been a little too punishing if I had a weaker party.

Now I still have 5k gold and probably still more food than I'll ever need (even with the 2x food penalty). I think ultimately food is what would have made the difficulty masochist level, but there's more than enough if you actually loot the scraps you come across. At that point it's all about whether you can handle a single fight with full resources or not, and I haven't come across one that's been too much (although maybe doing the hag at level 4 without Magic Missile was ambitious and I got a bit lucky). Hell, I just breezed through the fight against

and that's one of the more difficult fights in the game. Smart tactics still matter, though. I just had that fight go spectacularly wrong in my Explorer difficulty multiplayer run with a friend where we decided to just range them from above. I tossed the Runepowder Vial without lighting it, figuring I'd have time, and they threw it right back and hit it with a fire arrow, killing one of my party on the spot and knocking the other into the lava.