I can add to that to diversify your squad as early as possible. Big Guns and Energy Weapons will play a large role in the late game, however they are nearly non-existent in the early game, sadly a problem in Fallout 1 and 2 as well. Small Guns, however, will become absolutely useless as early as the mid game due to absurd amount of armor the enemies at that point will have, so get ready to start using different sort of weapons by that point. Like I said, balancing in the vanilla game is fucking worthless, I spend years re-balancing the game to suit my needs and even if I wanted to, I don't know how to link my changes in a portable format lime ESM or ESP or Bethesda games, otherwise I would. You are just going to have to get used to the game's jankiness and try to finish it, then use the game's editor(which is easy to use, thankfully) to make the changes you want to see yourself afterwards.