Alai: Why are you travelling between cities so much? Also, always save before you travel and be ready to load if you run into trouble or too many random encounters.
Also, another reason you might be running into too many random encounters is your luck factor and your outdoorsman skills. Luck can affect a whole variety of things, which includes encounters. your outdoorsman skills allows you to avoid encounters, both by choice (you get asked if you want to face the random encounter) and by chance (lower percentage of encounter).

BakaNi: It's not a lack of weaponry or amour, I must have 7 hunting rifles, 5 submachine guns and countless knives, but of course, all of them are completely useless as no-one has any ammo to sell or useful items to trade.

BakaNi: I've recently finished fallout one and found the combat relatively easy. Fallout two on the other hand is becoming frustratingly difficult.

Trying to move from one city to another, is an exercise in misery and frustration. Every 5 steps I'm ambushed by slavers with sub-machine guns on full auto, or hordes of radscorps and suicidal zerg rushing highway men.

Within a few encounters, I'm fresh out of ammo and medpacks, still miles away from where I'm trying to go. Am I missing something here?

It's not a lack of weaponry or amour, I must have 7 hunting rifles, 5 submachine guns and countless knives, but of course, all of them are completely useless as no-one has any ammo to sell or useful items to trade. So I'm stuck with Suilk (who is excellent) and Vic (who is an utter cretin who constantly misses and drops his weapons on the floor, normally under a pile of bodies so I'll never find them again) either stabbing or punching fully armed and dangerous enemies.

Please tell I'm making a huge error somewhere and that I won't have to throw fallout 2 into the dustbin of broken games?