“Intelligence affects the Science, Repair and Medicine skills. The higher your Intelligence, the more Skill Points you’ll be able to distribute when you level up.”

Intelligence gives bonuses to three skills, and for every point of Intelligence you have, you’ll get one extra skill point to distribute per level. This skill used to be one of the focal points of the build in the vanilla game, but with Broken Steel, things are diffferent. On one hand, you have half again as many levels, so you don’t really need a super high intelligence to max all your skills out at 100. On the other hand, it’s the only skill that isn’t retroactive… In other words, it’s the only one that will suffer if you don’t have it high early. For that reason, you should start out with nine points in Intelligence. The extra skill points will make maxing all our skills out at 100 easier, and having a few extra skill points to spend along the way will be helpful.