The thing about a 1-10 scale for SPECIAL is that some people may infer that a SPECIAL of '1' is truly awful and a SPECIAL of '10' is awesome.

It stands to reason because '10' is er 10 times bigger than '1'... duh...

But when you look at what carry-weight (Strength), hit points (Endurance) and action points (Agility) are accrued by selecting between 1 and 10 SPECIAL points, the real increase you get (or more particularly don't get) is quite a surprise (at least it was for me).

And I'll give you the punchline before sharing the stats, carry weight only increases 40% from 1 to 10, Hit points (health) only increase 50% and action points basically double in number from 1 to 10.

If you run with a Strength, Endurance, Agility build of 1,1,1, you are certainly weaker, but you are not a weakling, simply by virtue of SPECIAL..

This means that SPECIAL choices at the outset of the game are all about the perks that you can access, and keeps a very wide variety of SPECIAL choices viable.

(Using http://vault111.com/?page_id=21 calculator)

What increase in STRENGTH actually gets you (in weight):

• 1 Base (210)
• 2 +5% (220)
• 3 +10% (230)
• 4 +14% (240)
• 5 +19% (250)
• 6 +24% (260)
• 7 +29% (270)
• 8 +33% (280)
• 9 +38% (290)
• 10 +43% (300)

What increase in ENDURANCE actually gets you (in hit points):

• 1 Base (85)
• 2 +6% (90)
• 3 +12% (95)
• 4 +18% (100)
• 5 +24% (105)
• 6 +29% (110)
• 7 +35% (115)
• 8 +41% (120)
• 9 +47% (125)
• 10 +53% (130)

What increase in AGILITY actually gets you (in action points):

• 1 Base (70)
• 2 +14% (80)
• 3 +29% (90)
• 4 +43% (100)
• 5 +57% (110)
• 6 +71% (120)
• 7 +86% (130)
• 8 +100% (140)
• 9 +114% (150)
• 10 +129% (160)

Just by this anolysis, if you prefer to use VATS, just on the numbers for example, you're better off favouring Agility over Endurance because 6 points of Agility get you an extra 71% action points to kill things approaching you, than the same 6 points allocated to Endurance giving you less than 30% extra health protection if those foes reach you.

The thinking process at start becomes - which perks do I want (in order)?

and which SPECIAL ranks facilitate those perks.

Not, how strong, agile, or enduring do I want to be?...

I don't know how Perception, Charisma, Intelligence and Luck upgrade (someone may know), i.e.

• Proportionately how much more aware / accurate are you with high Perception?
• Proportionately how much more charismatic are you with high Charisma?
• Proportionately how much more experience do you gain with Intelligence?
• Proportionately how much better is the loot / more frequent are the criticals, with high Luck.

Charisma is particularly interesting as the ability to talk yourself out of a situation is rather binary, you do, or you don't.
(the same may apply to lock/safe picking and hacking)

Anyway, sorry to ramble, I'd be interested to know what you think

Isn't Carry Weight 200 + 20 per ST point? I'll have to check the E3 footage again. And can we be so sure HP is 80 + 5 per EN? That leaves level out of the equation, and we know character level affects health.

And honestly, it seems like the base effect of SPECIAL is secondary to the perks they unlock. Having access only to the I1 perk is different from having access to all of the Intelligence perks.

I was using this cute calculator:

http://vault111.com/?page_id=21

Hope my anolysis is not totally based on speculation !!!!

(there is a risk of that at the moment I guess...)

I was talking about starting hit points, so with levelling increases, the differences would depend on whether additional level hit points are fixed or scale with ENDURANCE, don't know that sadly....

Mmkay, yeah, it's +10 per point of ST, my mistake. At least as far as the E3 footage shows. Not sure about AP and health, though, don't feel like checking.

So like every other RPG?

Note that the chart on vault111.com has now been updated with a link back to http://www.gamesas.com/topic/1530622-completed-perk-chart-speculation thread

Very decent of him to put the link in a prominent position instead of on another page like the other guy.

You make a compelling argument for your extreme build type that you were talking about before. If it's not a weakness to have a 1 in strength then that would really make your extreme builds much more viable.