You can view your active weapon's range by holding down N. Still, it does bother me that the only way to enter combat is to alert the AI. I understand why they did what they did, but it has three unfortunate side effects: You can not start combat in cover, so every fight pretty much starts with all your characters being complete idiots standing around with their weapons in idle poses. Second, the leadership bonus does not apply outside of combat. While the bonus isn't that big, it does cheapen the feel of the game a bit when your veteran squad leader can not help spot and direct fire for your sniper's first shot at an unaware enemy. Third, it is very awkward to do stealth kills in real-time. Walking up behind someone is fairly easy, but juggling keyboard shortcuts or aiming with the mouse just seems so awkward and out of place in this game. Sure, in Fallout 1 and 2 you can start combat manually, walk up behind someone, put a grenade down their pants and run off in a single turn of combat before the enemy has time to react, but does it really make the game too easy? Every fight in Wasteland 2 seems to involve three or more enemies, so even if you can do cheap stuff to one of them you still have a proper fight with several remaining enemies.
Once the fight gets going you have a practically omnipotent view and control over the battle, it just feels awkward and strange how every fight must start so messily. We're a crack team of bad ass killing machines that communicate telepathically in the toughest of situations, why can't we form and execute a simple plan while we still have plenty of time to do so?
Post edited September 24, 2014 by Sufyan