I am at about level 4-5 and I have exactly three quests that are supposed to be at my level. But none of them are achievable.

The one that should be easiest because I haven't got level 5 in lock pick! That seems awfully restrictive, given how early it is in the game. That's the quest to deal with the guy in the apartment in town.

The second quests is to find someone in the Casino, but there is no way to get past this without having to fight far too many enemies for this early in the game.

The third -- beats me. I'm supposed to find a mechanic but none of the mechanics are interested.

Is there any way to level up by travelling around the countryside? Or am I just going to run into high-level enemies?

You can open many doors with weaponry if you can't pick the lock, just attack them. You give up the experience you'd get from picking the lock and also immediately alert any enemies on the other side of the door.

I'm just guessing which casino fight you're talking about, but I believe it is possible to avoid it with high enough social skills. That being said I usually just send one person in by themselves to start the conversation and immediately die since the whole enemy crew gets to take the first turn. Meanwhile the rest of my party hangs back outside in the hall. It's just a badly designed fight, it's not impossible. Don't forget your consumable items, drugs, grenades, etc., you cannot win every fight without using that stuff.

I was also stumped about where to find a mechanic. You need to do the sidequest where you deal with refugees on behalf of Gideon Reyes. If you haven't got that sidequest yet, wander around Colorado Springs until you get it. Doing it will require you to head out onto the world map and do other stuff as well. You don't need a mechanic just to use the Kodiak and leave town. Now, there is absolutely nothing in the game to hint that this particular sidequest is the only way to get a mechanic, which is necessary to progress past a certain point. It's dumb.

Additionally, you can actually customise the Kodiak without a mechanic - mechanics just add to the stuff that you can buy (and of course are required at some point, but they're part of a main mission so you cannot not get them).

The casino fight is definitely avoidable - there is actually a way to arrest Fargo without any violence whatsoever (though you do have to do a related quest, outside of the casino, which is guaranteed to be violent). It doesn't even require that high social skills - there are many ways to do it, I'd recommend fully exploring the areas of the casino you have access to and talking to everyone as per usual (especially in the brothel).

As for the level 5 lockpick - yes you can blast the door; however a better (albeit exploity tactic) is to head back to Ranger HQ, and swap out one of your rangers for a new recruit. Either pick a pre-built one, of if they're all crap just build a new one and ensure that they have a high enough lockpick. Any new recruit you choose (and also anyone you had previously left back at base, whether a recruit or a named NPC that can join you) gets auto-levelled to whatever level the majority of your team is at, so don't worry about losing anyone. If you'd rather have the other ranger back, you can always swap them over afterwards.

I actually swapped out one of my starting rangers because it turned out her skills were covered by an NPC I'd met. In WL2 this would have been almost a cause for a restart, but here - no worries, just make a new ranger that fills in the new gaps.

I also had a couple of rangers whose only purpose was to mod weapons and armour, and left them back at base (except for one optional extra bit at the bizarre one time).

Thanks for all the helpful hints. That will make life a lot easier.

The game is completely unbalanced (e.g. human oponents HP rise from 20 to 3000...). So don't worry, balance only gets worst from there.

I wouldn't say "unbalanced", as even on supreme jerk battles will tend to get easier as you go.

But this is because their way of attempting to "balance" the game is indeed by simply giving enemies this ridiculously massive amount of health. I suspect they did this because it's really easy to build up your team such that you get criticals quite often, and critical damage is HUGE in this game.

IMO it would have been much better if instead of making the enemies have stupid amounts of health, instead actually made the AI a bit better. I think I've only ever seen the AI actually use "skills" like ambush one single time in my entire play through, and that was in one of the first series of battles.

It's pretty stupid how someone with a sniper rifle can insta-kill someone, yet if you fire a rocket at someone it does about 10% damage. Like WTF?

If anyone's having trouble with combat, the cheesiest thing to do is to make sure you have at least one person with mechanics skill and just chuck out a sentry gun or bot helper - enemies will almost always focus on them first.

Another tip - possibly another bizarre balance thing - is to get animal whisperer to a decent level on as many people as possible. While this makes combat drag out like crazy - those cats take FOREVER to take their turns - at a certain point animals can both absorb lots of damage and dish out insane amounts of damage too - even a lowly pussy cat can get regular criticals later on, never mind something tougher like that badger. And while not as much of a magnet as turrets and robots, enemies will also be forced to shoot them. And the recent patch beefed up a few of them too! And all this is before taking into account the bonuses they give to the team member they're "attached" to.

I ended up having a bison (or whatever you get from that ranch), a cat, a badger and a cyborg chicken by the end, and they would do their share for sure. The only annoying thing is if you care about keeping them alive, as they like to get in the way of your more devastating weaponry.

I think one of the biggest mistakes they made was giving everyone the ability to revive fallen rangers. The only reason I even had to care about getting anyone downed was because I chose "medical miracle" for one of my customs (so couldn't revive him).

I mean everything is off, and they probably just made it worst by trying to balance a stupid system in the first place.
TBH WL2 combat engine was much better, Fallout 1&2 also were better balanced and "realistic", even the indies at ATOM RPG did a better job.

You could be right. IMO it's still most likely due to the way criticals work in this game, that necessitated the vast health increases to enemies.

WL2 wasn't exactly that "balanced" either from what I recall, but it was generally also pretty easy and I personally thought the overall WL2 experience was pretty boring, so...

Agree F1/F2 balance was superior, and even ATOM was better as well (some fights were REALLY tough in ATOM, but in general it made sense, i.e. decent weapons tended to down most enemies in a few hits at most).

Yeah, this game has absolutely no semblance of balance or difficulty curve. It's a hodgepodge of half-baked nonsense.

Fallout also has no "balance" or whatever, basically if you have metagame knowledge of where to go to get good stuff and what to avoid until you're higher level then it's trivially easy. Of course Fallout isn't a squad-based tactical game, it was an RPG, so it's not a big deal whether the combat feels tight or not. Wasteland doesn't have that excuse.

The CON assigned to enemies is really funny, in my opinion. Some Scorpitrons have 2500 CON, some have 6000+. Why? Who knows. It doesn't matter. Unless you're doing it wrong you'll poke it for a little bit of damage, fishing for crits, and then one of your snipers will one-shot it for well over 3000 damage. I had a sniper one-shot the big boss worm in one of the endgame levels with a sneak attack critical for 7 or 8 thousand damage. Conversely, when I blundered into the Godfisher shrine in the same area, my entire team was wiped by their snipers before I got a turn, all one-hit KOs. Assuming you aren't using terrible guns, CON doesn't matter on either side. So the ridiculous CON inflation of the enemies doesn't even matter. If every character had exactly 1 point of CON the game wouldn't play that much differently.

The dumbest moment in this game so far I've experienced is when I kicked off the fight in the Scar Collector bar. My whole team plus Discobot got instantly wiped... except the one Ranger wearing the verchitin armor, upgraded with extra elemental resistance and using the cyborg tech that makes you immune to crits. That character took no damage from anything and basically soloed the encounter with a little help from the invincible toaster. That is a triumph of bad game design, in my opinion. That the enemies all got to go first in a fight that, narratively, I started, that they did so much damage that it killed my entire squad before I got a turn, that the elemental resistance/Armor mechanic is so broken that this one armor with a particular mod makes a character invincible... Where to even begin.