I just bought Wasteland, and so far I hate the game. Seriously, since so many people around the world love to play this game, I must be missing something. :-)

I understand with these really old games I can't just jump in a play. For example, it took me a few hours to get the hang of Ultima I, but after reading the manuals and FAQ's online I was ready to go and enjoyed Ultima very much.

So I've spent a few hours reading the following before attempting to play Wasteland.
(1) Wasteland Game Manual
(2) Wasteland FAQ by Stephen Sedmak and Chris Baer
(3) Pages 1-12 of Per Jorner's Walkthrough

Then I spent an hour making my own party based on suggestions from Per Jorner's walkthrough. I backed up my save game folder so I could do some trial-and-error until I figured out the mechanics of how to play the game. Once that was done I restored my save game folder and ventured forth.

But I'm still somewhat confused by how the game operates, and I find the game so punishingly hard that it's totally unenjoyable.

An example of where I find the game mechanics confusing is at High Pool. I found the kid at the bottom left corner. The game asks me if I want to talk to the kid, so I say Yes. Then it asks "About what?" but if offers no suggestions. What the hell??!! How am I supposed to know what to talk about?? I try randomly choosing topics and all I get is "I dunno". Sure I can bounce out to a walkthrough to find out what to talk about, but I prefer to use walkthroughs only as a last resort. A FAQ or something explaining "talk" with NPC's would be helpful. Do NPC's have certain verbs/nouns/objects they recognize like the Zork games? Or is some other mechanic used?

So I traverse every single square of High Tower and all I find is the guy selling stuff. So I leave. Yes I know I should sell stuff to get money early in the game, BUT I don't know if I'll need any of the stuff (e.g. Rope, Match, etc.). So I'm afraid to sell anything. :-)

Then I find the next place just a little to the West. Don't remember the name of the place, but as soon as I enter, the game directs me to read paragraph 56. So I bounce out and read paragraph 56 to learn there's some varmits giving these guys trouble. I say I want to help, and then I'm "teleported" or something to some different location (what the hell??). So I start moving around the new location looking for the varmits. I hit a spot where it says there are desert lizards 22 feet away and it asks what I want to do. I opt to Attack.

I try attacking a few rounds using pistols, but decide I want to get away since my team is taking more damage than I'd like. So I try Running. Which is useless. My team runs. Lizards follow and keep attacking. I try using Crowbars. Not much better, if any, than pistols. I try to heal my team members (all team members have Medic skill of at least 1 so they can heal each other), but when I opt to heal I get a message saying "XXX will heal over time" (???) and no hit points are restored. So I go back to attacking. When it's over, I've lost half my team, most of my ammo and the remaining team members are half-dead. And this is my first encounter!!

I tried building a different team under a different save game. Details varied, but overall experience was the same.

Boy this game sure is a load of fun to play!!! ;-)

As far as I can see, the game doesn't give any warning that you're about to run into an enemy (e.g. show icon on screen BEFORE you encounter them). It just tells you AFTER you encounter it and asks you what you want to do. And running apparently isn't much good because I've tried running from every encounter, and I can NEVER outrun without taking damage, often serious, to my team.

So I figured I would save BEFORE an enemy encounter...but ohhh...wait...I can't do that because I don't know when I'm going to run into an enemy...and once I do, I can't just run away to avoid them...so no matter what I try to do, I'm always getting blindsided and guaranteed to take damage and loose some or possibly all of my team.

Oh, and there's only a single save slot too!! So to make sure I don't accidentally overwrite my last good save, I have to kill my current session..but wait...even that is convoluted. Both Alt-Tab or Ctrl-Esc don't work. So I have to press Ctrl-Alt-Del, select start Task Manager and then kill my game. Then relaunch, reload, and try and avoid the enemy that just kicked my team's ass.

Any tips or suggestions on how to make this game more fun will sincerely be appreciated!!!

As I said at the beginning, there's probably something I'm missing here, since Wasteland is such a beloved game.

I'm really not intending to diss Wasteland, but it's definitely trying my patience. :-)

Thanks!!
Craig

First, for combat, single shot firearms are not that good in Wasteland. At the start of the game, you want to give your characters Brawling skill (spending the skill points to start at level 2 in the skill might be worth it; it gets you an extra melee attack) and fighting with melee weapons is the best strategy. Once you get weapons capable of automatic fire, you can switch to using those (you don't need to be skilled in them for them to be effective). The only other weapons I have found useful are anti-tank weapons, which ignore defense but are expensive and slow to use; they're only worth using against high defense enemies (like tanks).

Armor is very important in this game; try to get the best armor you can. (Armor acts as damage reduction, not evasion like in many other early RPGs.)

The Medic skill is used to treat characters who are injured. If a character has positive health, or is just unconscious, you will need to wait for them to heal (hint: if you stand on top of a town on the world map, you won't get attacked). If a character gets severely injured or worse, however, the character's condition will worsen over time; that's when you need to use the Medic (or Doctor) skill to stabilize the character. One other thing to note: Whenever you switch maps, the game will automatically save. You see, the game was originally distributed on floppy disks and ran on computers with RAM measured in kilobytes; hence the game could not keep the state fully in memory. Rather, when you leave an area, the game would save that area's changes to disk.

Assuming you're running the game on DOSBox, you can press Alt-Enter to switch to windowed mode, at which point you can close the game easily. On the other hand, if you are running the game under true DOS or on another ancient computer (like the Apple II), the only way to quit the game would be to reboot the computer.

(One other thing to note: To get more skill points, you need to raise your Intelligence.)

dtgreene has already given you some great tips on combat, healing, and disk management, but I wanted to comment on a few things:

1) Healing: as already alluded to, the way to heal is to rest. Resting is done by simply passing time (ESC key on the keyboard) until you recover all your hitpoints. Whenever time passes there is a small chance you will meet a random encounter, unless you're in the deep desert where it's "VERY HOT" (make sure you have canteens for all your rangers first!) or on a town icon (apparently, I don't think I've ever tried this in all my years playing this game! :D)

2) Disk management: Just to clarify on what dtgreene said, if you want to be able to reload an earlier version of your party from a previous time in the game for which you made a backup copy, you will need a backup copy of all the disks from that time, because the game does actually rewrite over the game disks themselves as you play. (Back in the day you would make a copy of the "Master" disks before play, and then play the game with those copies, keeping the Master disks pristine). *NOTE: This is all true for the C64 version of the game, so based on dtgreene's comments I'm assuming it applies to the DOS version too, with which I'm not very familiar.

3) NPCs NPCs will respond to certain key words. You need to type them in yourself without help from the game. There is no penalty for typing the wrong thing (most of the time), so if you think the NPC should be responding to a particular topic just try variations (people's names, and locations, are often good topics). There are not a lot of NPCs like this in the game, but there are a few. In the case of Highpool, just explore around a bit more for some topics for conversation (MINOR SPOILER: there is a notice on the wall inside of the building which contains the store which is a list of things happening in and around Highpool).

dtgreene, 01kipper,

Thank you both for the quick responses and useful tips!! I'm going to restart my game and focus on developing melee skills. Good tips on healing while standing on a town. Also thanks for clarifying how to rest.

So assuming everyone has a canteen, do I need to periodically refill them somewhere? If so, how? I assume the team has to Use their canteens, but how do I know when that is? Don't want them dying of thirst, but also don't want to waste water either.

Also I'm still a little fuzzy on how healing works. I had a team member with Max Con of 32 who was at Curr Con of 9 during the fight with the lizards. I used the Medic skill and got the message of healing over time. As I said in my first post, I tried to have my team run to no avail. So this guy was the first to go. Can you elaborate a little more on how healing and the Medic/Doctor skills work?

Also any tips on avoiding combat until the team levels up a bit? Does the SPeed attribute make your team run faster? In other RPG's I often use running to get away from enemies I encounter that my team is not yet ready to face. But I'm not sure if that's an option or not in Wasteland.

Regarding managing the single save game, the Alt-Enter tip is useful. Thanks!! The GOG version saves the games in a folder under my Windows User Profile. So I just make a copy of the save folder and restore it if something goes wrong. It was just a little inconvenient with Alt-Tab and Crtl-Esc not working. But Alt-Enter solves that. :-)

Thanks for the tip on the notice posted in Highpool.

One final question, how can I tell when the team can interact with something? Doors are pretty obvious, but in Highpool, the only place I could enter was the vendor. So why are all those little houses there if they can't be entered? I'm probably missing something obvious here. :-)

Thanks

Let me explain, in more detail, how health works in this game, as it's a bit more complicated than your typical RPG.

A character with health displayed as a number will, assuming the character isn't diseased or something, recover health over time. (You can press ESC to let more time pass.) The Medic and Doctor skills will do no good when used on the character, and it is not necessary to do so at this point.

If a character takes enough damage to reach 0 Con (but not too much), the character will fall unconscious. Such a character is unable to act, but will recover on their own, with the same Con they had before they were knocked unconscious. It's interesting to note that such a character is actually invulnerable until they wake up. Again, Medic and Doctor won't do anything to this character.

If a character takes even more damage, the character might become severely injured or worse. A character who is injured will worsen over time, unlike characters who are healthy or merely unconscious, so get the character help as soon as possible. If not helped, the character will go from severely injured to critically injured, to mortally injured (IIRC), to comatose, to dead. It is at this point that the Medic/Doctor skills come into play; using one of them will, if successful, stabilize the character so that they are merely unconscious.

I believe that a character with a Medic skill of 1 can only treat severely injured characters, with higher skills alloying you to treat characters in worse condition. A character who is comatose can, I believe, only be treated with the Doctor skill (although, to be fair, I don't think I have ever seen a character get knocked straight to comatose). A character who is dead can't be treated with either skill; the only way to remove that status involves a glitch that can only be done once.

As for Medic versus Doctor, Doctor is better, but costs more skill points to acquire, has a higher Intlligence requirement, and can't be chosen at the start of the game. On one hand, injury is so rare early in the game that you can do without Medic in the early game (though I might not suggest that on your first playthrough); on the other hand, Doctor, while nice, isn't actually necessary. If you give both skills to the same character, Medic becomes pointless once you get Doctor, as the Doctor skill is strictly better.

Canteen's don't need refilling, and I'm 99% sure they don't even have to be equipped, each character just needs one in their inventory. They are only useful to prevent you from taking damage when you're deep in the hot desert. Characters who are UNC or have at least 1hp left will slowly heal and recover with the passing of time.

Characters with a condition (SER, CRT, MOR, COM) will *not* heal over time, and in fact will progressively worsen over time. Characters who have one of these conditions will need to be cured up to UNC using Doctor (or Medic until you can learn Doctor) before resting. Using Medic or Doctor doesn't always work, you will often need to do it multiple times on a given character to cure them (create a macro to make it easier).

Doctor is a VERY important skill, you should make sure all your characters learn it when you find it (and have a IQ21 to learn it). That way as long as one of your characters is not SER or worse, you can always cure and rest to recover your entire party (the only thing Doctor cannot cure is death). No, I don't believe Speed attribute makes any difference. You can run away by fleeing off of the map. I don't actually try to run from combat myself anymore, so I don't have any good tips for you unfortunately. Trial-and-error. As you noted, some of the buildings can be entered and some can't, so you just need to try them all. Just explore around and be curious. (MINOR SPOILER: There are a couple more buildings down at the south end of Highpool which you can enter as well)

As a final note, I'd recommend giving everyone in your party Perception as well, it's a useful skill for everyone because quite often the game will make passive checks against it. You also need to use it actively sometimes too.

EDIT: Also, make sure you have an appropriate weapon equipped for your Brawling skill in combat, eg club, ax, chainsaw. You can also use things like crowbar, pickaxe, shovel, or sledgehammer before you find these weapons.

another combat tip is that combat will continue as long as one person/creature can still attack from their position in either group
so if your attacking those animals from the example given in 1st post and want to run away take a round to equip something other than guns, crowbars for example then next round have your party run away from the enemy since both parties are all melee types combat should end

in this game there are a few places where you will have to figure out what to say to people early on the clues are in teh areas the people are in like the little boy in highpool
in other cases the info is found in other areas that direct you to the location where you need to talk to someone and tell them a specific word
a good walkthrough will provide the necessary conversation words (as well as how to get them)

A few more details on skills and melee combat:

Brawling affects how many melee attacks you get, no matter what weapon you are using as a melee weapon. This includes fists and unloaded guns. It will affect the damage only from weapons that don't have another associated skill. Also, it will only have a chance of increasing if you are using a weapon whose damage is affected by this skill. I believe that spears, while used like anti-tank weapons, also use this skill, but are treated as ranged weapons. (Note, however, that spears do *not* ignore defense.)

Pugilism affects your unarmed damage, but note that unarmed is not as good as weapon damage.

Knife fighting affects your damage when using knives in melee combat. I don't consider either this skill or pugilism to be worth it.

Your skill in a gun will affect the damage dealt by using the gun as a melee weapon when it has no ammo; however, the damage increase per point in skill is lower than for other melee weapons (2d6 per point instead of 3d6 IIRC). Note that the melee damage dealt by a firearm is based off the damage its shots do, so if you find a weapon whose shots individually deal a lot of damage, it could actually make a pretty good melee weapon. (Wondering how much damage you could deal by using that one glitch rifle, whose shots deal 200d6 damage (and which you can only obtain via a glitch or save editing) in melee.)

Thanks very much for all this useful information!! I really appreciate the time and effort put into everyone's detailed responses. Very helpful!! :-)

also if you havent already been taking notes it can help a lot to do so

oh and fun tip your characters will get exp for any skill checks that happen during combat

Good tips in this thread. Thanks!

I think I know how damage is calculated (though someone claims high Luck increases ranged damage; I don't know how that works).

Ranged is simpler: Each weapon deals a certain number of d6 worth of damage. The target's armor absorbs its AC in d6 of damage. For example, a rifle (6d6 damage) used against a target with AC 4 will do 6d6 - 4d6 damage.

Automatic weapons: These weapons hit multiple times, with the target's AC being applied individually to each hit. Hence, these work best against low defense enemies, like animals. Note that the number of hits is random (I think I read that the game groups them into groups of 4, and for each group, 1d4 of those shots hit), but you get a huge accuracy boost (equal to the number of shots fired) that tends to overwhelm most other factors (range being the one exception); who needs skill (+8 at level 8) when simply going full auto gives you +30 (assuming 30 shots)?

Anti-tank weapons: These ignore the enemy's AC, making them useful against high AC, low CON enemies such as heavily armored humans.

Spears and Grenades do not ignore defense. (Hint: Throwing Spears against heavily armored enemies, while an ineffective strategy, is actually a good way to increase your Brawling skill.)

For melee:

You always get 1 attack, plus 1 per 2 points of Brawling, regardless of what weapon is used in melee. (Note that Brawling won't increase unless your weapon uses the skill.)

Melee-only weapons get 3d6 extra damage per hit with each level of the associated skill. Unarmed damage is 3d6 base, with each level of Pugilism getting an extra 3d6 damage. (Note that every melee weapon is at least as good as unarmed, so Pugilism isn't the optimal choice for damage, though it does make a decent back-up for anti-tank weapon users (since you don't need to equip it after firing).)

If a firearm is out of ammo and is then used in melee, the damage is equal to the weapon's base damage + 2d6 points per point in the associated firearm skill. Yes, this means that rifles do more damage than pistols even when you're just hitting enemies with the weapon itself and not using it as a gun. Also, certain energy weapons that have low ammo but do lots of damage per shot can make better melee weapons than most actual melee weapons.

Regarding skill increases:
* When attacking, the chance of skill increase is higher against enemies with higher AC.
* Weapon skills can't increase above the enemy's AC.
* No skill can increase past the user's level by use. (This means that you need to be level 2 to get Brawling to level 2 (for the extra attack) unless you spend the extra skill points to start with it at that level.)

This has all been very helpful to me as a beginner. Thank you for the question and all of the replies.

You're welcome.

By the way, the Luck stat affects firearm damage, so using an automatic weapon with high Luck will allow you to do large amounts of damage.

(I posted some test results in a different thread. Unfortunately, I don't feel like looking for it now (but I believe it was a thread I created, so you can look for my avatar).) Worth noting that some of these words are in the paragraphs found in the original manual.

Do note, however, that there are fake paragraphs that might have passwords or combinations. Using such a password may actually work, but will generally have some side effect, and that side effect won't be immediately obvious. (The manual warns you about there being fake paragraph, as does Paragraph 1.)