If you find that you would have rather made different choices at the beginning with your chars, I highly suggest starting over, even if it is a little grueling to think of. It really will go a lot faster when you go through it again, and you'll be much happier for it. I did the same thing, and was rather frustrated for quite a while when first playing the game. I found the camera annoying and the combat repetitive and unrewarding and annoying as well. Just give yourself a break for a handful of days and come back to it so it is more enjoyable. Better characters will lead to better encounters and you'll enjoy playing them and the game much more.

I find Ranger difficulty a LOT better than Seasoned. Seasoned was just annoying, it didn't make you think but it wasn't just a breeze either so it was kind of this shitty limbo of combat. Ranger has me thinking a bit more and with that it is much more fun. The encounters are all different and there are many different approaches and varying encounters all through the game. You just have to treat them as so, think of them as actual situations and think about how you would handle them. Some take more thought and positioning, some take a grenade. Those reviews I think that are so negative are from people who never gave it a chance and just figured it should play how all other games they've played. Combat is fun in this game I'm finding, now that I've learned it a bit better and gotten ahold of the camera (I really hated the camera for a bit, then I took a break from the game and when I came back to it it worked well for me, it just takes getting used to.)

The game does tell you everything you need to know as far as quests and what needs done, but there's a lot of text and information, make sure you have voice to text selected in options so you can read everything in the printout (I think that's how it works) and don't miss anything. For the gas and the fans, you don't need to know any codes or anything, you just need to figure out how to switch on the fans and clear out of the gas. Try and get into the minds of your rangers and think about each thing you need to do. Look around at all of the things. Perception is important.

The -Ass skills are each unique, if you want all of the dialogue options in the game, take them all. If a dialogue option has an -ass skill there, use it right away because it will disappear if you don't choose it when it appears. You can switch which character is "talking" during dialogue, as you've probably discovered, so putting them all into 1 character isn't necessary (and I tried it that way myself and found it very limiting as far as what I could do with that character, plus it makes no sense to have all of those personalities in 1 character.)

With how I have my characters setup, I'm not really lacking for being able to use any of the skills and I don't have high INT across the board, and I'm also a completionist. I had to forgo some alarm disarming early on but I went back to the spots once I acquired the skill and otherwise was able to do everything at every point (some things being medium and a rare one here and there being hard.)

You say that you read that you should put attribute points into str and awareness. Really, there is no "should." I see all that stuff that you see too, people talking about how it is "best" done and all of that, it really is ridiculous and untrue. I don't know what they're talking about, but I think it comes from an arrogance of feeling like with most games they are able to say "this is the best build and this is how it works best to play the game to get it done optimally," but it's just not true for this game. I find my energy weapon to be consistantly doing better damage than any of my other weapons, including my ARs, and my EW user has less skill points in his weapon than my AR user does in his. I read so much of the "advice" stuff and just shake my head and wonder what game people are playing.

I'll post a quick summary of my chars.

Like I said I started over 3 times and tweaked each time and tried a few different things, ending up on Ranger difficulty and my -ass skills distributed among 3 characters. I chose which weapons I wanted to use, and then the 4 attributes I thought were most important for each of the chars and went from there. Except for Zax they all have 4charisma, except for Pem-So they all have 2STR, and except for Vigmar they all have 4INT.


Zax - 7charisma is his strong stat. Also 6 Coordination and 6 luck. He uses smart-ass, energy weapons, toaster repair, and leadership.

Kalari - 9 Coordination is her strong stat. Only 5 awareness and it works quite well. She uses sniper rifles, animal whisperer (great for keeping the animals away from combat since she's the sniper, only a slight issue so far when she's on a roof, they're also great stat boosters for her), mechanical repair, and weaponsmithing. She has less skills than everyone else because she is going as high as possible with sniper rifles so she can head-shot more accurately, which to me is the whole point of being a sniper (what snipers snipe people in the chest?)

Pem-So - 9 strength is her strong stat. 6 luck (helps her a lot I find.) Blunt weapons (primary), shotguns(secondary), hard-ass, perception, and brute force.

Vigmar - 8 Int. is his strong stat. He also has 6 coordination and 5 luck. He uses assault rifles and is the kiss-ass. He does most of the other skills unless Rose does them: lockpicking, safecracking, demolitions, alarm disarming.

With all of that, I have everything covered because Rose has 10INT and does surgeon, field medic, computer science, and outdoorsman.

This is NOT a completionist's game. You can not do and see everything in a single playthrough. There is no optimal path, no optimal build. You shouldn't concern yourself with character builds and stuff like this, just create the people you'd like to direct through a roleplaying adventure and go with what you find. Discover and experience the game on your own the first time around, don't backtrack or get frustrated when quests play out the "wrong" way.

Wasteland 2 is a roleplaying experience. That should be your starting point.

Fired it up again and managed to finish the Ag Center this time. Having done all that, I'd hate to redo it with only slight changes to the characters. Ideally I'd drop at least one 'Ass', but other than that I'm more or less pleased with them. They're not all good in combat, so it's a little disappointing there is so bloody much of it, but I like the perceptive leader bloke, so I wouldn't change him anyway. Must have played at least 15 hours to only get this far, which is surely slow as heck, but that also means I couldn't bare to redo these areas. This is probably a fair point. Perhaps I'd enjoy the combat more at Ranger difficulty, due to having to think more about stuff. But I also don't really like the combat, so prefer to just get it over with. Right now we rarely are in mortal danger, but I also think about what each person is to do, so it's not all bad. It's simply too repetitive, which I think has more to do with the game itself rather than Seasonal vs Ranger. Good point on the ass types per person. If I had redone them, I'd probably drop kiss ass and hard ass from the main char, and gone with just smart ass instead. It would fit an intelligent person better. Then put some skill points into mechanical repair perhaps, or something else, like leadership. Not going to start over for small changes, though, but it would be great with a re-spec mod.

Don't have mechanical repair or alarm disabling right now, and only 1 in toaster repair, so I've had to pick and chooes a bit, but it's not been too bad so far. Guess that will change, though, as I assume requirements are fairly low in Ag Center. Naturally there is no absolute "musts", but I do see the advantage of putting more points into Awareness for more combat initiative. Already now, various bugs and animals are attacking quite frequently, so it would be good if more of our guys could get in the first shots.

That leads me to weapons. In my experience so far, which is admittedly short, assault rifles haven't been all that much to write home about. Energy weapon has been worse, but I read they will get much better later on when enemies have better armour (how ironic). The big decider for me has been the sniper. She one-shoots enemies quite frequently, and if I save 1-2 AP in the first turn, she can fire twice in the 2nd. Sometimes that leads to three kills in two turns. ARs are versatile, though, so I do see their utility, but I'm not seeing much damage unless they happen to get a lucky critical.

If possible, I prefer to kick off battles by moving the sniper into a good position, then crouching down and (hopefully) killing an enemy.

Have experimented a bit with Ambush, but it's not ideal as they only fire once, it looks like. But sometimes it's better than to rush into a poor position to fire one shot, and then have loads of enemies on him next.

Ambush is a misleading title. I made good use of it through Ag Center trying to avoid the exploding pod people. Save enough AP to activate ambush after the pod person down to very low health, then pull away any characters who are in melee range . When the pod person activates and starts moving, he is blown up by a drumroll of gunfire.

Amen!
By the way, if you feel that need to begin from start again, you can use the pre-,made characters, they are well balanced

The Skill *-Ass, at least two different could be useful. Maybe because I played a lot of D&D, but the first time I only focus one single skill and was awful, in this game you need at least two (one for make the first strike and the second for finished, and sometimes for the second strike)

P.d. Rose is very useful as well as you learn (and there are minor and greater surprises with her all the game)
This will be similar with the skills, learning in the game is the best way. I personally discovered the power of the riffle assaults and snipers thanks to Angela. Other good thing, in this game the weapon is useful even at the end of the game (you don't need to migrate to other weapon like with the Fallout 1&2).

The lasers weapon are very tricked, if you carry more armor than the minimum for that weapon, is going to be a hell for your party, fortunately, the same applies to the bad boys.

There's a game editor if you want to respec your characters. I used it when I was figuring out the game to see what various levels in skills would do as well as what effect different values in ability scores had. You could use that to adjust a couple of your characters if you didn't feel it was 'cheating'.

Not sure what you mean about first strike and second up there about asses (this sounds X rated :D).

Sounds like the armour mechanic in this game is a bit borked then. Normally you want to find better armour to face better equipped foes, but in this game it can actually disadvantage you. Bit weird if it's better to walk around with nothing, or very light armour.

Where might I find this editor?
Then I could be able to remove for example the point in kiss ass and put them into something else. Doesn't really make sense to have all three 'personalities' covered in one person. Would be better to drop both hard ass and kiss ass from my main character, and put more into smart ass, or elsewhere. Also wouldn't mind removing the points (at least level 2) of surgeon from the sniper as Rose/Angie (don't recall which) already is high levelled in it. Would be better to put it into field medic instead.

Small stuff like this would be nice to change, but it wouldn't be worth starting all over for it.

Are the +1 ranger stars random drops btw? I'm a little puzzled, because we have found 3 or 4 +1 Hard Ass stars so far. On that note, it doesn't appear like the tougher safes and such lead to as good loot as I had thought. Usually just more ammo and 'junk' (I like that it's labelled as junk, as I can then assume it has no actual use).

Yeah, you get it from a link in the first post Here. The post explains how to use it as well. Just take note that if you're adjusting skill ranks, it goes by how many points are required to achieve the rank. So three ranks is 12 skill points, 6 ranks is 24 skill points, etc. I think there's a table there as well that shows it. Just keep track of how many skill points your Ranger should have so you don't cheat yourself of too few or give him too many. This won't break the game or cause any issues, but I figure you want to be fair to yourself and not go all uber skill on the game.

Yeah, they're random drops. I haven't got one yet and my Rangers are level 25. And I also don't really like the fact that tough safes yield crappy loot. Should be some sort of scaled loot table for tougher safes, IMO.

Thanks. I've changed two characters around a little bit now. Removed Hard Ass and Kiss Ass from the 'leader' (-4), and added another level to Smart Ass (6 points now) and put 2 into Leadership. Will perhaps add some Ass-Kissing later, the normal way, but figured I'd try to develop Leadership a bit, and it probably wouldn't hurt to put more than 1 level into Shotguns at some point either. He's quite useless in battle :D

On the sniper, I removed Weaponsmithing (2) and scaled down the Surgeon from level 2 to 1. Thought about removing it altogether, but having two persons capable of reviving people probably isn't the worst idea in the world. So that -4 points there too, which I added to Field Medic, which is now level 3 instead of 1.

Loaded the save in-game, and it showed up, so it looks like it went well, without frying the computer.

This is actually quite frustrating, because it is time-consuming to keep checking for loot (I know I don't have to do it), and when you invest valuable points into the relevant skills, you want to get some rewards for it. Right now, I can't really see any benefit to it. May as well just have skipped those hard safes and containers, as they just contain ammo and junk anyway.

Demolition still makes sense to put points into, as there are apparently traps on EVERYTHING. Seriously, how would people live in this world? Yes, it's for gameplay... but it makes little sense.

But sometimes you just gotta laugh at Computer Games Logic. Tried to hack through some plants blocking a door or opening in Ag Center.
Machete - No good
Various guns - No good
Hmmm... let's step it up a tier or four.

TNT - Ineffectual

Well then... How do you like this rocket launcher..?

Ineffectual

WTF? Seriously sturdy PLANTS.


Anyway... I'll give it another spin now and see how the re-spec'ing works out. It's good to know that option is there, without having to replay the whole game. As long as people don't abuse it of course, giving themselves full points in all categories or "Hmm, this guy won't be swayed... let's bump up this stat just for this conversation"

Kathy is so mean :(

Having finished the game (Ranger difficulty) with a terrible, terrible party (due to both inexperience with the system and fun though ineffectual roleplaying-oriented character builds), it seems to me that you can make due with pretty much any team, provided you fill the gaps with recruitable npcs and rectify some mistakes once you get a feel for the game and level up accordingly.

However, a few lessons were learned, generally painfully :

- never set intelligence under 4 at start (but remember intelligence 5 to 7 is pretty much useless), unless you really want to roleplay a retarded, single skill bruiser of course
- get at least 8 Action Points for every character, or be ready for heavy frustration when you get to higher tier weapons, they can get pretty expensive in APs
- aim for at least 10 combat initiative, or you might soon get to the situation where your character can only attack every other turn
- a melee character with low combat speed is ineffective, and would be useless if not for the ennemies' tendency to rush to close quarters as soon as combat is initiated
- luck is definitely not a dump stat, and higher luck characters end up with high damage output thanks to frequent criticals (and the occasional bonus AP is often a boon)
- charisma might seem like one (except for the character with leadership), but you still need some to recruit certain awesome npcs, and the bonus xp gain is very significant (at the end of game, my character with the lowest and highest charisma had a 10 levels difference)
- coordination 6 is generally enough for a long range character, with maxed weapon skill they'll reach 100% hit chance eventually

- you mileage may vary, but personally my most consistent damage dealers used assault rifles and bladed weapons, with smgs a close second, and energy weapons become enormously powerful in the last third of the game
- concerning dialogue skills, I found very little uses for hard ass, but smart ass and kiss ass stayed useful till the very end, and there will be several level 10 skillchecks
- as for container opening skills, I got the most use out of lockpicking and science. Science in general has many uses, and is actually a combat skill to some degree. If you save AG, you will get a npc that can handle the science stuff and can therefore skip it on you core team, but if you go Highpool, science is a must-have
- leadership, combined with good charisma, has a tremendous effect on you damage output, seriously consider maxing it
- one doc and one surgeon is mandatory unless you hate yourself of enjoy a frustrating challenge
- a high (8 or 10) intelligence character with mastery over a wide range of skills but miserable fighting ability may actually be an fantastic addition
- high perception is useful pretty much all of the time
- weaponsmithing does not need to be maxed, but a few levels will save your life (a single point allows you to get the marvelous early-game item grip tape, which reduces the melee AP cost by one) A fully upgraded weapon is significantly more powerful than its vanilla counterpart, especially when you get to higher tiers mods.
- barter and outdoorsman are probably your safest bets for dump skills, and alarm disarming has very, very few uses

- additionally, keep your skill books till you can raise a skill that cost 6 points or more, and keep an eye out for skill-modifying trinkets, they will help a lot , for example you can give a character with 0 surgeon skill and item that raises it by 2, effectively giving you a second surgeon for when the main one is lying in a puddle of his own blood
- most of the skill I haven't mentioned are not too useful from a minmaxing point of view, but will provide interesting situations once in a while and make for a great roleplaying experience: toaster skill for example will provide a lot of unique items that can trigger additional dialogues or quest resolution options, and there's nothing quite like defeating a giant death robot with the help of your trusty goats.

Well... is a wasteland, everyone died often there... is a harsh world.. and the curiosity will kill you quickly Actually, I had this same problem, even worse when I tried to rescue the people, though in the first part of the AG center, the text say the plants are getting "extra nutrients". After you stop those nutrients they are vulnerable to TNT and rockets. But yes, had to use survival skill instead of knifes skills for rescuing the people is not very intuitive.

By the way, second strike I mean, sometimes you need Smart ass for be able to get a Bad ass or kiss ass option (or any mix of them). I think, there is one conversation where you need all of them for be able to get the impossible. Everything is tactic in this game, the best armor protect you against all EXCEPT lasers, you (and the bad guys) become more vulnerable to the lasers as your armor become better. So, tactically talking... KILL THE GUYS WITH LASERS FIRST or your tank guy will be roasted, and if all the bad guys uses lasers... fight naked! (or with armor too lower for their lasers) Of course, by the end of the game you will fight a mix of bad guys with good armor, bad armor and lasers and normal weapon (and let say that scorpion in the menu screen is not a decoration and you will H-A-T-E it)

Other way to see this, the game do not become easy just because you find the best armor . And you will not kill everything just because you has lasers or heavy guns (as happened with the Fallout's franchises and the first Wasteland).

P.d. the good news, the Scorpion V2 do not have the same weapons as the scorpion of Wasteland 1 otherwise...

Wanted to comment on this again. Strange how the randomness can work out at times. We're only level 8-9, and so far we've found six(!) Hard Ass +1 Ranger stars. Also a +1 Barter and +1 Mechanical Repair. Would be great if we could melt them together; a +6 Hard Ass would be very useful.

Think the game has grown a little on me, now we're done with the Ag Centre, and the story has expanded a little with access to the Citadel.

Have so many free skills now, 10-11 on a couple characters, so need to decide whether to specialise more or cover more bases. Leaning towards more specialisation, and particularly develop more weapon skills. Perception is already up to 7 on the leader, which I would think should be fine for a while, so will put some more points into Leadership.

The dumb as a plank bruiser will have problems due to only 1 intelligence, so all points there should probably go towards Assault Rifles, at least for the time being.

I'm trying to lean less towards meta-gaming. Normally I'd probaby not buy any gear because in most games you get what you need in loot, but this time I've done it differently, and just spent almost all our 2000 scrap on new weapons, armour and ammo when we got access to the Citadel. It also looks like the merchants there have a set amount of scrap, so you can't use them as cash machines, so in that sense the "barter" system makes more sense, so better get something in return besides more "money".

Edit: Oh mercy, strike that about free points... I have 18(!!) skills points on the leader and Rose. Even Bruiser has 8. Guess I forgot to "call in" for a while :P

Was going through all the characters when trying to decide what skills to pour points into from the sniper and Rose, and noticed that the sniper has 1 less *attribute* points than the rest (Angela has 31 to the normal 29, for some reason). Figured maybe I messed it up somehow when swapping a few skill points around early in the game, but then opened up a fairly recent save, and there she had a free attribute point. So I wonder if the game has bugged out somehow. She is level 12, and isn't wearing anything that takes attribute points away. Have anybody else experienced something similar?

That oddity aside, I ended up giving the bonus attribute point to different areas for each character.
Brainiac: +1 Awareness
Bruiser: +1 Strength (it retroactively added the HP per level HP as well, which was nice)
Eagle-eyes: Missing the bonus point for some strange reason
Natalia: +1 Speed
Angela: Not there yet, need level 20 as she started higher than the rest
Rose: +1 Coordination
Scotchmo: +1 Intelligence

Ralphy was a bit useless, so took on Scotchmo, and then later Chisel offered to join. Tough choice between him and Scotchmo, but I went with the drunkard in the end. Hopefully somebody more capable wants to join later down the line, as shotguns don't fit the way I play due to their lack of range. He's amusing though. So far I've done AG Centre, Nomad Rails, plus assorted mini-areas, and have just finished Prison Valley, ready to move into the main area, presumably.

So glad I purchased the Pullpup sniper rifle - she's a menace now - and the M16 for Bruiser was a good choice too. Unlike many other similar games, you're not drowned in great weapons through loot, at least so far, so it has been better to buy good weapons when available, and melt down the rest.

Also glad I put Leadership on the main character. The sidekicks are much more stable now, and will only run into the middle of combat on the odd occasion. Why she would run up like that without even firing a shot.... AIs are always a bit wonky I guess *shrug*