Hello.

I was wondering if there's any way to "force" grid / encounter, so I could get behind cover and shoot from them, and see weapon range before actually engaging mobs.

I tried manually going behind a rock, and shooting from there, but I can't seem to do it until I actually enter combat :(

No it's not possible. The developers said that they will not add such a feature as they believe it will enable cheap tactics.

I don't see how, other games in the genre lets you enter combat when you want to. If at least they had formations it would have made it a little bit better.

however, you can see the weapon range. Place your cursor on the weapon icon and a red circle center on your character will be shown, this is the range of your weapon.

You can fire one round of bullets if the characters have a range greater than the enemies field vision.

It's strange that they'd claim that, this has been playtested to death in Fallout 1 and Fallout 2 and it led to absolutely no "cheap" tactics.

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?

Hmm, you *can* start the combat in cover you know.
Just click on the button to be able to move each character individually, put each one of them in cover or wherever you want them to start combat, then select your best long-range weapon and shoot at the enemies (with manual targeting if they're not hostile yet).