You'll come upon better armor in your travels - some merchants will give/sell it to you for completing quests. The rest is hidden in out of the way places. Not stashes, just sort of secret spots. Since Complete allows you to repair armor it's less important that you constantly find new sets, but you definitely want better armor than what you've got at the beginning.

I read somewhere that there's actually a Stalker Suit - pretty good armor - hidden somewhere in the Rookie Camp, but I've never found it.

When you help Bes waste those bandits, you should be a little better off for ammo on account of all the corpse-looting you'll do.

For what it's worth, Spike (and Kay), the first time I played STALKER I was in exactly your position at that point. Shot up, shitty armor, desperate for ammo. I was actually on the cusp of giving up when I managed to turn a corner. Hang in there!

In my own game, I've arrived at the central hub in Rostok and discovered that more paths are available from there than I'd originally thought. In previous playthroughs I always went a certain way, but today I discovered that a whole wonderous buffet of options exist. Viva la Zone!

Night vision comes built in on some suits of armor - just hit... N, I think.

Don't worry about depleting your flashlight, though, it never runs down.

on armour:

xtal, I think you can play a far less active role in the saving of Mole. Is anyone here aware of the Flashman books? I was able to adopt the role of a heavily armed operator who operates slightly behind the cutting edge of combat who arrives in just-in-time to take the credit. Anyway, I would not proceed without pruning  your stuff prior to the encounter so you can upgrade from the spoils.

Spike you've already noticed the enemies respawn. As you wipe out bandit camps they will repopulate and you can (could at least) watch the replacements make their way from the edge of the map to the camps where they were. If you intercept them and wipe them out in transit, you give good teams the chance to populate the camps instead. One of my greatest rewards in this game was seeing how my influence change the map from mostly red to mostly yellow camps.

One last thing. You will pass by Garbage later in the game. The enemies don't get any tougher, and you'll be packing bigger better weapons. It is advantageous to stash appropriate weapons and ammo (south of the Bar maybe) for your return trip so as not to waste high powered ammo on weak enemies. You can never buy the good stuff from this part of the map.

Sing to the tune of Snorks up your pants.

Shoot your snorks a mile away

and you will have an easy day.

But if you give those snorks a chance

you'll have snorks all up your pants.

I love Wild Territory. Which is strange when you think about it because Snorks and Bloodsuckers make me scream. But for some reason it's one of my favorite parts.

It's best to get a scope as early as possible, and I've discovered two ways to get a one at this point in the game: either in Wild Territory (from those guys who shoot at you right off), or in Dark Valley (as a reward for helping a member of Duty rescue a buddy). Freedom from iron sights really transforms the entire game.

Does anyone know of a way to get a scope earlier? The first third of the game is so hard in part because you're shooting down those crappy iron sights.

I think that scope in Dark Valley is the first one available in game. It is available as soon as you can get past Garbage. I've gone in the past to get it right away. The radiation isn't so bad if you can run through it. Dang. Maybe I should see how well this game runs on my i5 quad core...