You open fire and the enemy is standing right in front of your face. This the most stupid game mechanics I ever seen. No way to ambush, like hide behind a corner and suprise enemy. They simply run and punch you in the face right after you'v fired a shot.

Yeah, great you can ambush after that. This makes no fucking sense.

Did the developers of this game actually play it themselves?

No words can describe this.

The "ambush" feature is improperly named. Perhaps it is a bit ironic given the subject matter of many games, but most game developers have very little knowledge of military matters, including terminology. The "ambush" feature in the game is on an abstract level more appropriately called "overwatch", though even that is an inaccurate use of military terminology. In it's most simple form, a fighter that is performing overwatch is stationary and is ready to fire upon any enemy as they appear while other friendly fighters are moving forward or are otherwise occupied and unable to quickly start shooting. It is a tactical thing, whereas an ambush is a loose term for an operational or strategic layer military action.

Games, including Wasteland 2, are almost entirely occupied with tactical level combat. You deal with things one fight at a time. You are correct in saying that it makes no sense to "ambush" an enemy in the middle of an engagement. I too find the tactical combat in the game rudimentary at best: Short distances, grid based combat with simplistic environments.

At least take^one of the 100 solutions for tactical combat, if you don't develop your own mechanics. Taking neither is stupid. ^^

I have to agree that the "tactical" combat in this game gets really boring really fast, which isn't helped by the really limited supply of random encounter maps.

The AI being dopey is one of the problems.

Another is the bizarre case of how energy weapons work. While there's some logic to the implementation (being stronger against heavier armor), they did a crap job of ensuring that the energy weapons are properly balanced. By which I mean, almost all of the ones you get later in the game are worse than some of the cheaper, earlier ones.

Actually now that I think about it, the "logic" for energy weapons doesn't make much sense unless we're to believe that every armor is made of something that conducts heat better than bare skin. You'd think that armor manufacturers would have accounted for this, at least on the more advanced armors.

IMO one of the better ways of implementing armor was the way the first two Fallouts did it - or more accurately, the way it was originally intended in the first two Fallout - where different damage types had different damage thresholds (subtracted from damage directly) and damage resistances (taken as a percentage of damage remaining after DT, and then also subtracted). Still not perfect - the main issue being that almost everything was way too resistant against lasers for some reason - but it made a hell of a lot more sense than the system in W2.

Apologies if the above rant derailed the OP's original complaint... ;)

How about the way they were implemented in the original Wasteland? In Wasteland 1, energy weapons are just semi-automatic weapons (meaning you can shoot Burst and Full Auto with them) that did more damage than other firearms. Defense is handled as damage reduction per shot, so a burst from a strong energy weapon will do more damage than going full auto with an SMG on enemies with strong armor. The mechanic works and is simple.

(Wasteland 1 did make anti-tank weapons ignore armor outright, however.)

I haven't played the original Wasteland so had no idea what it did until now.

What you describe is kind of close to Fallout's way of doing it (it does it per shot), except the first two Fallouts added the complexity of different DT/DR for different types of weapons. Which is kind of cool, although most of the time you're not going to change armor in F1 based on the type of weapons the enemy has - you'll just go for the better armor overall.

There is one issue I have with the Fallout method though - it isn't the fact that it's per shot, but that for some stupid reason automatic weapons seem to do less damage per shot than single-shot weapons - so a pistol round is somehow more damaging than an assault rifle round, which doesn't make any sense. That and the fact that laser weapons aren't really better (and often worse) than conventional arms (but plasmas are pretty good at least).

I have no problem with energy weapons doing more damage per beam than bullets though, since that would make sense. They need to have some advantage over conventional arms, so it's either damage or accuracy (or both).

Anti-tank weapons being able to penetrate armor makes perfect sense to me since that's what they're designed to do.

I believe the actual mechanics are something like this:

A to-hit roll is made, and you get bonuses from your skill level and the number of bullets being fired, and a penalty for range. (One consequence: even an unskilled character can reliably hit when going full auto.) Note that this is, I believe, an open-ended roll; your chance to hit is never zero.

For automatic fire, only some of the bullets hit. I think the mechanic is something like grouping the bullets in groups of 4 and of each group 1d4 hit.

Then, for each hit, the weapon damage is some number of d6 (typically 4d6 for pistols and 6d6 for (assault) rifles), but the target's armor reduces the damage by its rating of d6. (Note that these two seem to be rolled separately, so using a rifle against an enemy with 7 armor can still do damage.)

Melee weapons do 3d6 more damage per point in the corresponding skill IIRC. The number of attacks is always based on Brawling. Guns used without ammo do only 2d6 more damage per point in the gun skill. (Note that the damage is based on the damage the gun would do if fired.) Bare hands do a base of only 3d6, so they aren't any better than weak weapons. Since you need Brawling anyway for extra attacks and the strongest melee weapon uses Brawling, your melee attackers should focus on Brawling skill. (Note that Brawling affects the number of attacks of unloaded guns as well, though gun skill affects the damage.)

The mechanics are similar to that of a pencil and paper game called Tunnels and Trolls and its splat book Mutants, Spies and Private Eyes.

One other thing of note: In Wasteland 1, there is a definite hierarchy of firearms. Clip Pistols are worst, but you start with them. Rifles are stronger, but still single shot. SMGs give you automatic fire (though the damage per hit is only that of a pistol), but appear a bit later. Assault Rifles are the best conventional (non-energy) firearms, but they appear the latest, so the skill is useless early before you get such weapons. Energy weapons only appear late in the game, the skill requires high INT and isn't available to starting characters, and ammo can't be bought. This is different from the more modern approach to balance of keeping each weapon type viable throughout the game.

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This sounds interesting, I might have to check it out.

Hopefully it'll also fix all the many little bugs that still remain.

Would also be good if it weren't such a massive resource hog, but I can't really complain about that as my machine is ancient and in desperate need of an upgrade. Technically the game would run better for me if I just bit the bullet and reduced graphics quality further, but it looks so much nicer at higher levels that I really don't like doing that. Plus there are other games that look decent without hogging all my RAM (even other Unity games), so not sure what unnecessary stuff is kept around in memory in this one.

Still, even if memory usage isn't considered, I wouldn't be against having smaller maps but more of them. Some of them probably didn't need to be that massive. Would possibly lead to less game time spent just walking around, especially since most maps don't feature much stuff that you can interact with.

Also, I hope the Director's Cut version adds something to the LA part of the campaign. I'm not referring to quests as such, but stuff around the base. For some reason I kept expecting the base to be "cleaned up" a bit and/or modified, even if only one building, since we did just take it over. Actually that LA base goes back to the point about massive maps - that base is a massive map with not much actually in it.

Also wouldn't mind the water supply issue to actually mean something. As it stands now, it's really easy to find an Oasis and fill up with water, and then in LA that mechanic just disappears entirely! I didn't actually mind that mechanic by the way, but I'm not sure what could be done to improve it so that it actually means something either.

BTW I like that radiation actually DOES mean something in terms of blocking off parts of the map - that's cool. But I still wish there were a radiation mechanic - e.g. as you absorb radiation your stats/skills suffer, including your max health, until you die. Would be cool to have this effect continue to worsen after initial radiation exposure. But I guess it's not that important - and I don't really want the ability to absorb vast quantities of rads and then magically "cure" it like in Fallout either - that actually always bothered me (a little) about the Fallout games. If it's curable then it should be expensive/difficult.

Finally, will the DC version do something about all of the ridiculous containers? I don't mind there being lots of containers, or even lots of ones containing traps, safe locks and electronic locks and normal locks - but it seems almost as if these were placed purely to balance gameplay as opposed to making any kind of sense. For example, why would a small town contain vast amounts of crates - supposedly all from before the war - just lying around - and no one has bothered to open them in the years they've been there? And there are trapped ones? And some have electronic locks and some have safe locks? There doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. You'd think that these things would be locked according to how important they are, and also located accordingly.

And they shouldn't always be crates either. How about desks or file cabinets or something? I dunno, maybe I'm being picky, but I felt like I spent far less time talking to people and solving quests than I did just picking random locks on crates.

Apologies for the massive data dump there - that'll teach you for respecting feedback! :)

Seriously though, if the DC version addresses the combat and loot/container issue as it says - and makes things more "realistic" that would be cool. Note by "realistic" I of course mean with respect to the game world - no one's asking anyone to remove all those random toasters! ;)

Really looking forward to the upgrade. I don't have any issue with the game, I like it for what it is and does.

The Director's Cut will be icing on a very tasty cake :)

I guess I should hold my game until release of the Director`s Cut, then?

Now to be fair, concerning the OP`s points, there IS some tactical gameplay, it`s just not as much as perhaps some of us expected.

Will be looking forward to the improvements.

I don't think that is the only reason..
Games also do not want to use terminology which can be construed taken from other games.
So they are also likely to use the closest synonym they can find.