I've just been thinking about a bit of a balance issue in the orginal Wasteland: that most of the gun skills are not worth investing in. In particular:

Clip Pistol: Early in the game, melee combat is better than ranged combat, and enemies aren't going to be killing you with guns before you close into melee range. (This is especially true when fighting animals, who lack ranged attacks.) Furthermore, since enemies early on have low armor, and the target's armor is what affects skill increases, you aren't going to get much skill in this weapon type anyway.

Rifle: Same problems as Clip Pistol. A bit stronger, but not strong enough and you are still better off going melee. It might be useful if you get the Red Ryder, but you can't get it without a glitch.

SMG: These guns are useful, but the skill is largely unnecessary. Shooting full auto gives you a bonus equal to the number of shots fired (so if there are 30 bullets remaining, you get +30 to hit (equal to 30 skill levels worth of bonus)), which makes it easy to hit even if you didn't invest any skill points in the skill. Also, this doesn't work well on heavily armored enemies, so you likely won't get a chance to increase this skill to high levels unless you go out of your way to do so. Also, ammo is so plentiful that it doesn't make sense to use any fire mode other than Auto.

Assault Rifle: Like SMG, but more powerful. You might be able to raise this skill to a decent level, but why bother when automatic fire gives you such a huge bonus that your skill is irrelevant?

That leaves Energy Weapon as the only gun skill that is worth investing in, and only because ammo is more limited and the weapon that does the most damage per shot only gets 10 shots, so your skill actually matters. (Also, the high damage per shot makes these weapons work on heavily armored enemies, which means you are likely getting plenty of skill increases through normal use.)

So why should I bother with conventional firearm skills?

(Related issue: Before getting Doctor becomes feasible, it is rare for enemies to do enough damage to severely injure your characters, so you can skip Medic and just reload if somebody *does* get severely injured before you get Doctor.)

I get what you're saying. In this game there are not many skills which are truly necessary. However, Doctor is one skill which is very important for all characters, for which you'll need 21 IQ, which means leftover skill points which you can put into other skills just for fun (for example, to flesh out each character from a purely role-playing perspective), which can include the gun skills.

Skill in Assault Rifle will also help you unjam the weapon successfully I think, and it may make your weapon less likely to jam in the first place? You should try doing a run with 4 characters: two with Assault Rifle skill and two without, have them all use assault rifles as often as you can and see if you notice any big differences.

I agree that the combat balance is wonky, Brawling is by far the best combat skill. (I usually have my characters use Brawling 99% of the time, only using Assault Rifle for some robots in Vegas Sewers and Energy Weapon for some robots in Cochise. But sometimes I find Brawling so cheesy and overpowered that I make a party which uses only guns instead, following the natural gun progression and the areas in the intended order).

If you put all points into Luck you'll do a lot more damage, about +1D6 extra per shot that hits for every 10 points of Luck. Luck 60+ can make lowly SMGs do energy weapon damage, with SMG sized 'clips', so full auto can easily waste even well-armoured enemies in a single turn. Probably easier if there's only a single Desert Ranger hogging all the XP, and a team of dead bodies to carry all the ammo. I had some fun with that. :)

I did not know this. Maybe I'll try this setup with one character at some point.

Also, don't forget that, once you get a character's Luck really high, you can clone her and get a full squad of characters who can destroy robots with SMGs.

By any chance, do you happen to know what the other attributes do? (Also, why do we have DEX, AGI, and SPD in the same game? Those three attributes feel like they're the same to me.)

spd is how often teh character will get a turn in combat
dex is how easy it is to land an attack, or use skills like picklock
agi is how easy it is to avoid getting hit possibly also reducing damage recieved basically dodging

In Wasteland 1 each character only gets to act once every turn (though Brawling 2, 4, 6, 8 adds extra attacks), so I assume that Speed is used to act before the opposition. But I've read somewhere that guns get something like a +100 speed bonus, so Speed only matters between guns vs guns or melee vs melee. Unless some Desert Ranger bumps up Speed to ridiculous levels I suppose. Then they could conceivably whack someone before they get a shot off. Never tried that though.