anothername: First away: I have spend about 30-40h into it yet & love the game. So what follows is really just bloated nitpicking (and maybe somebody even knows a greater meaning behind some of it which has eluded me for now).

Oddball Combat:
Overall its fun. Enemy NPCs don't rush in like dumb animals but take cover or try to cuddle up with my sniper to render her/him ineffective. In short: They use tactics and that is great. BUT:

1) If the enemy NPC is indeed a group of dumb animals it is facepalming hilarious to see them being as tactical savvy as human NPCs. I mean I am no animal expert but if a pack of wolfes (or mutant toads/whatever) attacks the expecting & in position rangerparty it is really silly to see usually the first one rushing past 2 rows of prey (short & midrange guys) just to get the far behind one. All that would actually be just half as annoying ist it where not for:

2) the 1 Million Action Point charger. Ok, a million might be a bit of a strech but some enemies must have a special running XXL pool of action points. At first I always said to my self: "He must have been lucky, just a meter in the fog of war & had just enough to get betwen my sniper & one of my assault rifle guys.". I tried to ignore it happening in almost every other fight but some Raider really took the cake and made it too obvious when he run from inside his camp near the frontgate to the backgate, around the corner, along the path down the whole length of the camp/fort again just to stand in meele range of my sniper. That must have been easily 60+ AP in movement! At that point it would have been less infuriating... eh.. to hard a word, less annoying if he just beamed in front of my sniper accompanied by some flavour text like "used mutant teleport ability".

It does not happen every fight, and I have not registered it more than 2x per fight where it does happen. But it does. And I'm pretty sure I would be raging a bit if I would actually loose rangers because of that like in a higher difficulty setting. Right now I'm happy I have choosen baby difficulty because why bother with more tactical challenge if the NPCs cheat anyway?

Some other nitpicking:
Ok, I get it. Its not Fallout 1/2. It has (besides being the sequel to the game that paved the way for fallout; made by some of the same people; being a similar setting and type of game... and some gameplay; and for the ease of getting it better communicated often be called as beeing made be the original fallout guys(only by fans afaik)) nothing to do with Fallout and its silly to expect otherwise.

But FO had some quite cool ideas in ability/skill synergys I dearly miss in WL2. A big example: brute force/bashing.. (?). That cool skill which is all about kicking down walls, ripping out steel cage doors or lifting carts half sunken in the swamp of dagobah. All by the power of the mind. A asthmatic zero muscle stick (Strenght 1, lowest ability value) of a person could do it if he/she with maybe Int 10 (highest ability value, massive skill point bonus per level) used that particular skill as funskill / dumping ground for leftovers. While the hulking titan, muscle mass Str. 10 value beast of the party with (because) a low int value has already problems keeping up with his main combat skills can't do anything. There are some other skills where I too think some synergys would make sense, but that one is so obvious in being completly independent from the Strenght abilty it begs for it.

*ponders* Ok, it might read a bit like smack talk. But as said initially I really have fun with the whole thing & recommend it to everybody who likes games like The Fall; Fallout 1/2 and Fallout Tactics.

Coelocanth: [...] I wonder if it's something to do with CI or CS though, as Sufyan pointed out (perhaps they get two moves in a row? Or something. [...]

Sufyan: Combat Initiative determines who goes when (the order in which characters are activated in combat), Combat Speed determines how many squares per AP a character can move. I think the enemies that run ridiculous distances have something like CS 4 or higher. Technically not cheating, just artificially unbalanced compared to the statistics a player can derive from their attributes and trinkets.

Coelocanth: [...] My high CI characters seem to sometimes get two turns in a row. I'm wondering if the same may be occurring for the mooks, where they may get two turns in a row and spend them all on movement, making it seem like they have many more AP than they really do. [...]

Sufyan: You don't get two turns in a row. You're probably using those characters to get the first shot or burst to trigger combat, and since they have the highest CI they get to go first once combat commences making it feel like two turns. Initiative keeps cycling through all involved characters in order until combat ends.

Coelocanth: No, I'm not being fooled by triggering combat. I'm not that dim. :P

It's only happened a handful of times, and it's entirely possible I'm mistaken, but just last night I had one of those 'sit up straight' moments because one of my characters had a turn right after finishing the previous one, and I actually said out loud "What the hell? How did that happen?"

Belsirk: Actually, I have the same history here, my sniper once in the fight got 2 turns. But, could be because some NPS choices to ambush you.

carlosjuero: Kind of wish we had some sort of dev input on the GoG forums, but I guess it is difficult enough to keep track of Steam & inXile forums without adding us to the mix eh?

Sufyan: .
Personally I love the attributes being largely disassociated from skills. I hate not being able to build realistic melee fighters but instead have to make them beefy in most CRPGs. Wasteland 2 delivered exactly what I wanted to see from a roleplaying system.

Coelocanth: .
.
I don't understand what you're trying to say re the skill synergies. I understand what you mean by it, but I don't understand your example.
.

carlosjuero: The devevelopers have commented on the steam forums that some AI packages are not completely following their AP limit rule (most noticeable with the Red Skorpion guards at the prison I belive). Instead of hitting their AP cap there is some bug interfering that makes it so they continue to move (this causes some long range fighters to get into melee in one round) - it is linked to their system of rushing all 'linked' baddies into the encounter zone so that players don't spend ages moving a few feet at a time to get that last annoying guy in the corner of the map (or so I have read); something between that code and the AP limitation is wonky. Next patch is supposed to fix it (or at least attempt to)

Kind of wish we had some sort of dev input on the GoG forums, but I guess it is difficult enough to keep track of Steam & inXile forums without adding us to the mix eh?

Coelocanth: Actually, Brother None seems to post here off and on.