Creation:
16 years old (experience is easy, cash is important early on)
Reflexes: 15 (gunnery matters throughout the game)
Body: 10 (moderately important)
Speed: 15 (dodge and piloting, duh!)
Perception: 15 (artillery, investigation, awareness)
Craft: 13 (code breaking, repairs, spot weakness)
Ego: 13 (mysticism, intimidation)
Knowledge: 15 (allows more skills and better training!!!!!!!)
Charm: 4 (explanation below)
Conversation and shopping are the only things charm is useful for. It's not that hard simply to become lawful, cheerful, and so on, and that will make conversation easy. Shopping naturally increases rapidly from selling the loot from bounty hunting missions. Plus, cash for mecha is not hard to get when you can kill biomonsters and super rats in personal scale combat. And finally, the other stats are simply more important to a huge degree, as in just about every RPG.
Choose combat pilot as your occupation for some great starting skills. Get mysticism (early experience!) and worry about cybertech when you can actually afford it, if ever! Get spot weakness, all mecha skills (except weapons, perhaps), small arms, heavy weapons, martial arts, resistance, medicine, dodge, electronic warfare, awareness, initiative, intimidation, weight lifting (you can get it later though, it's mainly useful when maximus armor is affordable), shopping, stealth, investigation, code breaking, and just fill out the rest with what you think is nice.
Stunt driving and kung fu are the only truly great talents. I find tech vulture a bit overrated, since the body parts it often simply yields what you can get from buying a mech. I think the weapons the enemy drops (starburst rifles, breaker cannons, and so on) and armor are more important than the limbs. It can be helpful early on, but later on you might want some stat boosting talents instead.
Joining the guardians first gets some great missions. Murder investigations are easy and provide lots of experience from unlocking doors. Stopping the drug dealer missions are easy as long as you have decent artillery/perception and arc thrusters to catch up with him. A class 10 sensor and awareness are also helpful!
Once you've built a legacy of skills and cash with the guardians and taken full advantage of their training, consider joining the monks. You should do lots of meditation anyway for the experience and ultimately the stat boosts, so joining them makes sense. First train martial arts up to 10 or even higher, and then join, so you end up with absolutely crushing power. As in, instakilling a hunter slayer in a single hit kind of power! With spot weakness, you're practically Chuck Norris!
If you want immediate power, get a good melee weapon. Beating the flesh pit in Ironwind Fortress gets you a golden chainsword, and the bone sword found in the ziggurat is also a potent weapon. Early in the game, these are superior to martial arts.
Save your earned experience for stat increases or new talents whenever possible. Don't put it into stuff that can be raised easily with training. That's why it's actually a better idea to put points into seemingly weaker skills like weight lifting, since the "more important" ones can be more easily trained up with cash.
The best missions are rescue missions and murder investigations. Pump pusher missions are also easy. Murder club missions are dangerous to both you and NPCs, so avoid them if possible.
For early quests, getting the mine mecha is a no brainer, as is passing Vikki's test for a free mecha (pray for a Puma!). Beating the Hogye tournaments wins you a great starting mecha, but it's risky for a new character.
In early combat, NEVER forget to skim. Otherwise, getting a leg blasted off means crashing, which means death, period. If you don't have arc thrusters, don't fight. If you don't have ECM, don't fight. If you don't have a shield, get one ASAP. Defense is immensely important! The only reason not to skim is so you can go in reverse and pound the enemy with artillery as they pursue, which only works if you have great artillery and the enemy doesn't. It's risky.
For the late game, stealing the IRIA ruby for a free point of knowledge can come in handy, getting the gladius from being arena champion can work great, as does getting the argoseyer (which might actually be overkill). Mastering every shrine is very powerful, and a little bit of cybertech could also come in handy.
The final boss has loads of backup, so nuclear missiles come in very handy! Superheavy missiles are a decent substitute, but the real deal is much better. A heavy laser cannon is great for its range, power, and speed. I recommend nukes for huge area damage, heavy laser cannons for energy weapons, breaker cannons for gunnery damage, and point cannons for missile defense.
Overall, the game is great, but unbalanced at parts. The most annoying thing is the random factor in joining factions (they often don't give the option) and the extreme power of missiles that either miss entirely or blow you to pieces.
