Depends on what you want to do. The beauty of SPECIAL and how the game generally works is that you can still get, say, 50-75% in things like repair and get mileage out of them.
The, uh, Gifted(?) background trait gives you +1 to all ability scores at the cost of some skill points per level up. It’s very powerful, you should consider it. Your ability score arrangements, and your 3 tag skills, sort of dictate how you want to do your business. Combat skills are specially noteworthy because they are some of the few skills that benefit from large skill numbers. Because of distance penalities (mitigated somewhat by Perception), called shots, and lategame armor it’s not unusual to have something in the 200+ range, to allow for “max chance” called shots. Tagging a skill gets you more bang for your skillpoint investment, so these are excellent skills in which to sink a lot of skill points. Generally you won’t want more than a two combat skills and just one is plenty viable. Small guns is everything from shockingly powerful pistols to sniper rifles, big guns is heavy machine guns/vulcans/flamethrowers/rockets, and energy weapons is all energy weapons. Both melee skills are plenty viable. However melee is tougher going until you know what you are doing (e.g. with proper forknowledge it’s possible to speed up the acquisition of Power Armor, which is really helpful for melee). The Power fist is an unarmed combat weapon (it’s also amazing), but most other melee weapons fall under the other melee skill (and the ripper and the super sledge are both amazing too).
If you like to be talky, Speech is good too. A high enough speech can make up for lack of ability scores and opens up a lot of interesting options (so too, though, will things like a high Int or Per). It’s a nice skill to tag. Sneaking gets a lot harder as the game goes on, if memory serves. So it’s another choice for tagging if you want to play in a more indirect manner. The First Aid skill is really nice too, as you’ll get more healing out of stim packs and such. It’s one that can benefit from being over 100%.
I doubt tagging anything like Computers or the Repair skill is worth while. Lock picking actually might not be a bad idea, I can’t recall anymore.
For leveling, you want to focus some portion of your skill points on your tag skills. The skill system works such that e.g. for every point invested you get a skill point up to 99. Beyond that it takes multiple points to get one % point. Tag skills delay that progression (and indeed, until 99 or whichever the first breakpoint is you’ll get 2% points for every point invested). But as I said there is some benefit to putting some skill points in off skills. You can get mileage out of lesser investment (repair, computers, first aid, lockpicking, even some sneaking).
For Perks. . . there are so many ways to build your character. If you want to do a lot of fighting, there are a couple of different things to consider. Anything to increase your action points can be huge; you want to look for break points that allow shooting two aimed shots (as a small arms or energy weapons user). Aimed shot users will benefit from boosting critical chance and especially from boosting criticial damage. The stackable perk that gives you bonus moves (AP that can only be used on movement) can still be useful. The Perk that reduces the cost of going into your inventory can also be useful. A gun user will absolutely want to grab sniper at high levels, this practically turns you into death incarnate. It’s possible to do non-aimed shot builds for non heavy weapons users, and even possible to run builds that get 3 attacks, but it’s a little advanced (and targeted shots are so darn useful). Fallout 2 has perks that give you +1 to an ability score which is occasionally useful but you won’t get htem until level 12. Melee users have a couple of perks they can consider grabbing for boosting attacks (and can also boost from the crit perks), and at high levels will want to grab slayer. Which 100% makes you death incarnate (all crits, all the time).
There’s perks to help with social skills, and you can even grab a fourth tag skill if you are so inclined. Even a sneaky character might benefit from things like the bonus movement perks. It’s a very colorful system that gives you a lot of room to do interesting things. Playing a luck 9 or 10 character can have strange and interesting impact on gameplay. It’s like a secret cheat menu except it doesn’t obey your input and shows up when it wills. It’s really fun. The so called “lucky sniper” who tagged small guns, speech, and something else to taste was a very popular build both for allowing you a lot of flexibility in how you approached the game (you can sue speech to get a lot accomplished, and then fight when you wanna; and when you fight you are a terror), and because of the other things Luck did for you.
For my own personal preference, Fallout > Fallout 2 by a significant margin, but they are both terrific and both worth playing for any fan of the genre. I replayed both back when they showed up on GoG, and I’ll probably replay them some time in the next year or two.
