This is just a quick, non-spoilerish post to toss out my personal thought on my biggest mistake playing FO4 so far.
It's been plaguing me and I regret a lot because I'm an elitist asshole min/maxer and I'm just sharing this experience because it may help you in planning out an initial build better than me.
THE CHARISMA TREE IS ACTUALLY INSANE.
Initially, I didn't have much in Charisma because I just shrugged and thought the following -
"Skills for my dog? Meh, whatever, I'll probably use humans and not care much about the dog."
"Shops in my settlements? Meh, whatever, why do I need more shops? I can find stuff to buy at other places."
"Turn enemies passive and potentially protect me etc? Meh, whatever, if you're good you shouldn't need the help." (oh how little did I know... Survival mode is laughing at me atm)
A) The dog is ridiculously powerful. I have had plenty of moments of jaw-dropping and saying, holy shit my dog is actually a terminator sent back in time to fuck up post-apocalyptic bandits for me. And when you skill him up, he can get nutty. Watching Dogmeat single-handedly skullfuck an enemy while you just sit and watch smiling is one of the most rewarding elements of this game, IMHO
B) The shops aren't "just" shops, they generate revenue for you depending on how big your settlements are and once you're running a steady network of settlements and pulling survivors in constantly, you make bank on this. Think Assassin's Creed style passive income, with the initial set-up cost paying for itself ten times over eventually. This feels a lot like that, it may be one of the highest reward-per-point-spent skills in the game.
C) I cannot even begin to tell you how pointing a gun to shoot at something, only to have it suddenly stop rushing you, and then actually turn around and attack his friends instead can just instantly shift the course of a fight. It is a-b-s-u-r-d when it goes off at the perfect times.
Trust me, don't ignore the Charisma tree. Don't make my same mistake. Many levels of leveling it up later in the game in regret did not make me happy, every level up is a huge deal.
I'll write up some other tips when I get a chance post-BlizzCon because I feel like there are a lot of things I'd do differently starting from scratch knowing what I know now, but for now this is my big one.
PS. Once we have maps and guides on where to find the Charisma Bobbleheads, this obviously won't be as big of a deal. Right now, I'm playing without them (and probably would anyway, ...probably... ...maybe) so I don't have that luxury. I suppose you could plan for +2-3 Charisma once those are available. Either way, plan for +1 Perception right away because the first Bobble you find is in a very, very obvious spot very early in the game, and it's a +PER Bobble.
