Skill books. Use now or wait?

[nimrock]

Hey guys.
I got some books increasing skills. Should I wait with using them till my character have high skill value since the higher skill lvl you have the more points it takes to increase it?
Thanks for any help.

[bruthablunt]

wait until you have a skill with one point left. it cost a lot for that last point

[snuggleform]

Generally you should wait until level 8 or 9 before using the skill book to save you the most skill points. Skill books the last time I checked don't shift the skill point requirement, unlike +1 items. If the skill point requirement were shifted from skill books, then it wouldn't matter when you read it.

The reasoning for waiting until 8 is that some skills have an associated utility item that gives +1 to the skill, so that if you use both the skill book and the utility item you can reach 10. (nerd stuff, survival, first aid, animal whisperer, armor/weapon modding, maybe some others).

The reasoning for waiting until 9 is that some skills have a skill book, but no utility item (lockpicking, all weapon skills, explosives, sneak, to name a few).

One exception to both these rules is mechanics, where you can obtain a hat that gives +1 to mechanics, and a utility item that gives +1, so you only have to raise it to level 7 before boosting it to 10.

Yet another exception to all the above rules is weird science; in the current version of the game I cannot find any skillbooks for this one, I double checked the overworld bunker the wiki listed but it doesn't give the skillbook anymore. So you're just going to have to raise it to 10 the hard way. And obviously the combat shooting from Gary Wolfe has no skill book either.

[nimrock]

Ok. Thanks guys.

[Kohwalter]

This game took a lot of controvertial design decisions that sadly undermine itself. Skill books is an example. Weapon mods and their one time usage only is another example.
It would be much better if skill books worked similarly as boosting items.
Another thing that comes to mind that I still did not test was related to respec. What happens with the book you used? Will you get the skill points it "gave" to you? Or we lose it?

[Radiac]

I like the "hold onto the book for as long as you can" approach, but remember that you might also find other objects that get you bonuses to a skill when worn. For example, Hard Ass is a skill for which there is a Book, a Utility Item, and a helmet which will get you +1 when worn or read. In that case, you are TECHNICALLY buying the 8th rank in Hard Ass when you read the book and then using the Veteran Ranger's Star and Scrap Helmet to get you to 10 from there.

When you retrain a guy:

1. Your guy's Attributes are all reset to 1 and you will have a ton of Attribute points to spend on rebuilding the guy. This means you'll have an Intelligence of 1, for the time being, which will make it look like some of your skill points disappeared. You'll get them back if and when you raise your Intelligence back to the level it was at before you hit the retrain button.

2. All of your skills will be reset to zero. You'll have skill points to spend equal to the skill point value of the ranks you had in your old skills. So if you had spent the required 22 skill points to get a skill up to rank 9 then read the book to get it to 10, you'll get 28 skill points from that.

3. Note that the static buffs you get from the Veteran Ranger's Star and Scrap Helmet, for example, DO NOT come off and are not going to get you any skill points back in this process.

4. You don't get any books you read back, they're gone forever. What you get back is the amount of skill points they were worth when you read them. So if you read the Hard Ass Book to get level 8 of Hard Ass, it was worth 4 skill points, so you got refunded 4 skill points for that rank of Hard Ass when you retrained. If you held onto the Lockpicking Book until it got you the 10th rank in Lockpicking, it was worth 6 skill points from that, and you get 6 skill points back when you retrain that guy,

5. There's a secret unlockable skill that is unlocked by reading a book. If you read that book, you get the FIRST rank in that skill and have to buy additional ranks from there on, if you want them. This skill is called Combat Shooting and if you ever retrain that guy after having read that book, your Combat Shooting skill will be lost forever. You get the book, entitled "D1ck Markowitz's STEALTH SQUAD", when you give Gary Wolfe the fourth and final synth head, completing Wolfe's Hunt, but he won't give it to you if you bought any cyborg upgrades from Vivisecto in the Machine Commune, or if you have any other cyborg characters on the team with you when you give him the head (namely, Ironclad Cordite). He somehow doesn't mind that you have robots in the base, nor does he care what you do with the Machine Commune in their story, nor does it matter if you hire V.I.C.I. to be your robot nurse.

6. Given how point #4 works (see above) this means you could read a book on some subject you don't actually care about, like say Animal Whisperer, then retrain the guy and use the refunded skill points to raise the guy's Sniper Rifle skill or something. Theoretically, you could retrain a level 22 guy into Animal Whisperer, Weapon Modding, and Armor Modding, get each of those skills up to a 9, read the books to get to 10 in all three skills, then retrain AGAIN and re-allocate the skill points you get back into skills you already read the book for on another guy, like Big Guns, Weird Science, and Explosives, or some such. Assuming you have the money and want to spend it that way.