Omerta, Gorky, Xenonauts, XCOM:EU, Silent Storm, Shadowrun Returns, Expeditions: Conquistador, Ghost Recon: Shadow Wars.
These are recent-ish (turn-of-century type) turn-based games that bear some similarity to what Wasteland 2 is doing: turn-based, squad-based, shooting-centric, and with grids (mostly). Every single one of those games has more interesting combat because they all decided to include some foundational gameplay mechanics.
Mostly though, I want to talk about Omerta since it is probably the worst game of the lot, yet had some interesting combat nonetheless and shares a lot in common with Wasteland 2's general pacing (in combat) and use of grid. Omerta gave you at least three different attacks depending on what weapon you were using + up to three special abilities attached to the various types of characters. That diversity applied to everything, meaning even guys with bats, knives and fists -- seemingly simplistic weaponry -- had at least three different ways to attack. For example, knives had Dice: quick attack that makes enemies vulnerable - vulnerable enemies take 50% more damage; Slice - an arc attack that causes enemies to be 10% more likely to be struck; or Knife Throw, a low damage attack that causes enemies to bleed. You also had your generic 'attack.' Each ability used different amounts of AP. Other weapons, notably the guns, had effects like fanning a room, suppression, and knockbacks.
In addition to this, the game implemented various grenade effects, notably grenades which you had to time (instead of throw-and-blast), smoke grenades, and molotovs which would blanket an area and essentially cut it off for the time being. That is to say, it could shape the battlefield, quickly shifting fights into directions you did or didn't want it to go.
Character abilities included pushbacks, spotting (increased chance to hit for party members), heal surges, damage surges, defensive boosts, AP boosts, party boosts, distractions (pushing an enemy's turn further back), and using one character to 'action' another character, for example, a doctor uses his ability to skip his turn and make it the turn of the party's primary damage dealer.
Omerta also used a 'courage' (read: morale) system. Many weapons attacked enemy morale instead of their health.
And I'm not trying to sell you on Omerta. It's an objectively bad game with the Tropico engine trying to force its way into a grid system, nevermind the nonexistent, singleplayer-Monopoly-esque strategic layer.
Now what's fucked in Wasteland 2:
Wasteland 2, by comparison, has: crouch, headshot (which really should almost never be used), attack, free weapon switches (the most variability in combat, which I enjoy), gun-specific/random ailment effects, and a much more rigid grid system (Omerta's is somewhat loose if not simply undecided in its nature). Some have mentioned that WL2 has a morale system but it does not. It has a simulation of enemy melee getting into the comfort zones of your ranged characters. A morale system would imply that if half your team got wasted by a rocket launcher, the surviving half would then panic and lose control of the field. That doesn't happen. Whereas Omerta implemented a way for players to observe and take care of troop morale, and affect enemies', WL2 completely removes the player from the equation. Not only does it remove the player from interfacing with whether or not a gun jams or if a party-member goes solo, but the few gameplay mechanics it implements are strictly unfun. This is why you can tell someone like Gollop is much more in tune with game design than whoever the fuck designed WL2's combat. Gollop frequently implements 'unfun' mechanics, but he understood that the player needs to know the rules of the game for a designer to get away with doing it, and in that way he can brutally punish players without cheating them. If guys in X-Com just threw their weapons down randomly, shot their own guys randomly, etc. etc., nobody would want to play that game. Recently, he took a quite literal RNG system in his Chaos game and turned it on its head with the illusion and alignment accrual mechanics. If the player is getting punished with no say in his own failings, you're seriously fucking up in the game design department. That is not code for "make games easy," by the way.
For example, a gun jam would make sense if you had the ability to, say, fire off a 5-round burst of an MG vs. the reliability of a singleshot, and the jam was the 'risk' you took. Single-shot weapons like revolvers (especially), pistols and bolt-action rifles would rarely jam, but they traded high damage potentials for consistency. Instead, guns in WL2 jam just because. Dumb. Dumb dumb dumb. And lazy. It's just a lazy way of introducing some procedural gameplay into combat scenarios almost wholly devoid of it. And you wanna know why I know it's shit design? Because one of my char's guns jammed three times in a row outside of combat. What purpose, exactly, did it serve? I wasn't punished with anything more than wasted time, and I had no say in the matter to begin with. There isn't even a modicum of "the gun needs repairs, that's why this is happening." That in itself is a barebones design and shouldn't really be a thing, but even then, nope: again, it happens just because. The same thing applies to losing control of party members. You should never just take the control away from a player without their input. That's a cutscene by another name. Nevermind that WL2's version of this fuck-y'all-I'm-out mechanic wherein the party member breaks formation and sprints toward enemy lines is less like "I'm my own man/woman!" and more like "I'm gonna go commit suicide."
As mentioned, the game has a "enemies are close, you get -% to hit" mechanic. Nothing wrong with that - except most battles begin with enemies bumrushing your lines, there's no zone of control to stop them (or pre-battle ambushes, which is funny, because that's actually what an ambush would be, but I digress), and the only way to counter-act an enemy in your face is to either kill it or take the same action to get away that it used to get in your face: moving. It'd be nice if melee characters had harsh zones of control that stopped enemies from moving through - a simulation of grappling as well as giving melee characters a different level of utility. Maybe winged enemies could fly over them. Maybe speedy characters could 'run through' enemy zones of control.
There's a lot of skills given to the map/exploration aspect of the game and it's fairly enjoyable to move through the land using your party like a big Swiss army knife. But all of that totally disappears in combat. And I don't know why, because combat is such a substantial part of the game. Combat needs to be more than crouch, move, attack, and hope for/against any number of randomness of which you have little to no say in. The boss battles so far have been totally, 100% unthinking. For the start of the game, it's not putting its best foot forward when a boss stands still and you just shoot at it and it shoots at you. Not saying WL2 needs to adapt any one specific system, whether it's the extreme of XCOM's rooted and ability-centric mechanics (streamlined character classes), or something more 'open' like Silent Storm/JA, but it needs something. Right now the primary diversity stems from what weapons you're using. That's just about the only step in the right direction the combat takes.
