- Unlike the Fallout games, you can't really make a non-combat character. As an Atom agent, you're basically special military, so you build accordingly.
- All combat skills are viable, but sniper is arguably the strongest. Generally speaking you want to specialize as much as possible in your combat skills.
- If you want to build for Charisma, you generally want to build a female character. This allows you to dump personality to 2, and allows use to a combination of sex appeal, joints, and perfumes to bump it up to 10 when needed.
- Dexterity 10 is almost always desired as with most of these games, Dex determines AP and AP is king. You also usually want to have at least 5 Str for any build (to use automatics) or 6 str if you want to use bigger guns like snipers.
- Finally, never dump Endurance. You gains very little per level and it's all Endurance based. So you usually want at least 6 Endurance, if you drop it to 4 you're going to be relying on drugs to get through tougher fights.
- There are 4 stat increases in the game. One of them requires high luck and RNG. 3 Come from quests. 2 of them can be applied to any stat, one gets applied to luck.
- Skillwise outside of your primary combat skill to 199, you want Speechcraft at 115, Tech at 80, and Barter at 50. Besides that feel free to do whatever. I find First Aid to be pretty useful since spamming healing items confers a cumulative stat penalty, which means getting more healing out of a single item is pretty valuable.
- Consumables are very important for getting through content and what not. Consumables with the same name will stack up to 2 times with themselves.
- For abilities the only must have ability IMO is Praetorian as it (and the lead up abilities) drastically improves your survivability.