Starting stats:
S - 8 or 7
P - 6
E - 10
C - 2
I - 7
A - 9 or 10
L - 6


Traits:
-Small Frame
-Gifted

Tag:
-Melee
-Unarmed
-Speech

Some comments based on my experiences:

This build has some obvious deficiencies. First and foremost the lack of range. By the end of the game you'll have so many hit and action points this basically won't matter. The low charisma means your barter will be in the negatives to start with. At some point you may want to consider spending a few points just to get it to 0 or even 10%. This will make a huge difference in your selling prices. Most likely money will not be a problem though, as you'll be selling 99% of all weapons and ammo you find.

If you want to save a perk lower strength to 7 and raise agility to 10. This is just a matter of preference. Many consider more than five or six points in strength to be a waste...and on some level they’re right. To me though, starting a close combat character with low strength isn't really in the spirit of the build. Also, before getting decent weapons eight strength helps tremendously as your hits tend to be much more devestating. Obviously you get the damage boost but you'll do the following things significantly more often: cripple limbs, knock opponents down, knock opponents unconscious (head shots), and blind them (eye shots). Which brings me to the next point.

There are a plethora of close combat weapons in Fallout 2. Most of them suck. The first "good" weapons are the combat knife and spiked knuckles. In the early game, one thing that can be problematic is people wearing metal armor. If you're forced to a fight someone in metal armor before getting either of these two weapons I recommend fighting bare fisted (no brass knuckles) and going for head (not eye) shots until you crit and knock him/her unconsious. Why bare fisted? In terms of hp, brass knuckles definitely do more damage. But for some reason using the brass knuckless seems to substantially decrease the liklihood of landing those devestating crits that knock guys down or out or cripple limbs. One other piece of advice: if you find yourself fighting multiple opponents in metal armor focus on knocking them all out before finishing them off. They tend to stay unconscious for a while and once they're on the ground you can repeatedly punch them in the eyes and have a ~95% chance of connecting.

I don't recall the earliest you can get spiked knuckles. I believe Flick and Tubby sometimes carry them. If you can't afford them you can kill both of these guys without losing karma or turning the Den hostile (though you will have to kill Tubby's guards). Doing this will also net you their entire inventory. As far as the combat knife, there is a trick to getting one very early, though it doesn't always work. Once you get Sulik, take his sledge hammer and start the rat god quest. At some point (during a fight) he may pull a combat knife and start attacking with it. Once this happens you can then take it from him and give him back the sledge. This knife will not appear in his inventory until after he pulls it, and sometimes he never does. Still, it's a nice weapon to get that early in the game.

Honestly, early on you're better off pouring points into unarmed and using bare fists or brass knuckles until you get the spiked knuckles. This tends to work better than spreading your points around. Once you get the spiked knuckles it's game on. Looking at their damage in the pipboy they don't appear impressive, but with eight strength and 125+ percent in unarmed you will destroy light and medium armored foes. Even super mutants and guys in combat armor become manageable. Just aim for their eyes and they will go down surprisingly fast.

Obviously with this build your ultimate goal is to end up with the super sledge and mega power fist. With these weapons you'll be a force to recon with. Once you have them both your strategy becomes simple. Against enemies with ranged weapons use the power fist (so you don't waste action points chasing them when the super sledge sends them flying) and on close combat enemies use the super sledge so they have to spend their action points running back into combat with you. The latter works well against packs of deathclaws, aliens/wannamingos and floaters.

Lastly, perks. For this build to be effective there are some perks you must get. Awareness, educated, better criticals, gain agility (if you started with 8 strength) bonus hth attacks and slayer. Also, don't waste time with the sneaky perks like silent running and silent death. This isn't meant to be a stealthy build. That said, here are some suggestions to maximize your chosen one's effectiveness.

-Bonus move (2 ranks) - If you're used to gun slinger characters this many seem unnecessary but once you have it you'll understand.

-Action boy (2 ranks) - speaks for itself

-Life giver (at least one rank at the earliest possible level) - This goes back to my Diablo 2 playing days; extra life is HUGE, especially for a hack n slash character. With 10 endurance, you're already going to be gaining 10 hp a level. That means from level 12 on you'll gain 14 hp a level and from level 15 on 18 points a level. You can do the math on that.

-Toughness (0 to 3 ranks) - honestly this one is a bit of a luxury. By the end game there will be very few situations in which you need the extra toughness and when they do arise a couple doses of psycho will max out your damage resistance anyway. On the other hand, FO2 has no level cap or time limit so...

-Dodger - might appear useful for this build but by the end game enemies will be extremely accurate. In other words, the extra AC is not going to cause them to miss a whole lot more, if at all. Wouldn't bother unless you have every perk above already.

-Bonus HtH damage - again may seem like a good choice because it's for hth characters but two damage is piddly and it doesn't even add two damage, it just adds two to maximum damage. Everything above is much much more useful.

-Packrat - may seem like a good choice because of decreased carry weight and low number of companions but you don't need to carry ammo (except microfusion cells late game when you'll have 10 strength anyway) and will be selling almost all equipment you come across.

-More criticals - Worthless once you get slayer. Dont't bother.

-Stone wall - marginal. You're not going to be knocked down very much without it.

That's everything. I hope if you try this build you enjoy it as much as I did.

Nice build, sounds like lots of fun. I ll have to create a fallout2 melee char now. :-)
Maybe I am going to take jinxed instead of small frame and put more points in luck.

Never thought of trying that. Sounds like it might be fun.

I'd recommend starting with a strength of 5 since you can get 1 from a memory module and 4 from Power Armor. AG should be 9 or 10 depending on which perks you plan to take and which mods you plan to play with (the RP adds the EPA which has an item which permanently increases AG by 1, but you could also just take the perk). I'd also recommend tagging either Unarmed or Melee, not both. I prefer one combat skill, Lockpick and Speech. There are many ways to increase Unarmed skill: Lucas in Arroyo, John Sullivan in Klamath, Punching Bags in Sierra Army Depot, and San Francisco provided you're good or evil enough and under 100 skill. The only freebies for Melee are Jordan in Arroyo, John Sullivan in Klamath and Little Jesus in New Reno (provided you're wielding some type of Knife). If you do plan on going Unarmed, I would recommend taking the One Hander Trait in exchange for Small Frame. It increases your accuracy with one handed weapons (including unarmed weapons) which helps greatly with called shots, especially early on. The earliest you can get Spiked Knuckles is stealing from the Dunton brothers as soon as you arrive in Klamath.

As far as weapons go, I dislike the Super Sledge for three reasons: it does not benefit from the One-Handed Trait, it does not benefit from Bonus HtH Attacks and it tends to knock enemies back, causing you to waste AP moving when they don't die. The Mega Power Fist will be your best weapon and you can get pretty much all the ammo you will ever need from T-Ray, provided you had a high enough Speech to convince him you were one of Bishop's Lieutenants when your car was stolen.

For Perks, Awareness is a given. I'd recommend against Educated as you get plenty of skill points unless your IN is horribly low and there are much better perks you can take at L6, such as Quick Pockets (useful early on and for soloing, allows you to go into inventory and reload and use as many stims as you like for just 2 AP) or Bonus Move. The other essential perks are as you mentioned: Better Criticals, Bonus HtH Attacks (if Unarmed) and Slayer (which actually does not make a LK check, you get criticals 100% of the time!). The rest comes down to personal preference. Living Anatomy is useful for +5 bonus per hit, Action Boy is useful, Lifegiver is useful if you take it early on for a major health bonus later and HtH Evade is useful if you're Unarmed.

When making called attacks, I prefer to go for the head always for three reasons: it has a chance to knock out the target, it has a chance to instantly kill the target on a critical hit IF you have the Better Criticals perk and you generally have a higher chance to hit a target in the head than in the eyes (unless the target is already knocked out or on the ground). However, I do prefer destroying the Sensors on Robot targets first, then the CPU.

Note: I'd also recommend against Jinxed for two reasons: if you're unarmed, you have a chance to lose all your ammo (or even worse, have your Mega Power fist destroyed!) and the same goes for your enemies, which ultimately means less money for you.

Anywhere I don't comment, I agree wholeheartedly. The punching bags and John Sullivan are great mid- or late-game bonuses for anybody. (Yes, I mean you should save them for a little while, depending on your build.)
That said, Lucas is hard to train under. You have to really suck at Unarmed for him to be useful. I usually find it helps if I take Good Natured.
Learning at San Francisco requires either somebody who has become quite good or quite evil, and also somebody who has not enough skill to have outstripped the lessons of the two martial artists. I usually have trouble meeting both requirements, and can't imagine having any luck doing so if I had been relying on Unarmed for very long as a primary combat skill. It's worth considering how you want to go about taking advantage of that. I couldn't get this to work for me, much to my disappointment. I begin to think One Handed doesn't actually apply to Unarmed. Maybe it's a patching issue. I'm pretty sure my use of the Super Sledge does benefit from Bonus HtH Attacks. I'll go back and retest, but I could swear I'd found it immensely useful.
That said, this is my opinion on the Super Sledge:
1) Initial approach with a Super Sledge will be much like any melee weapon, and potentially AP intensive. If cover is available, retreating behind cover causes your enemies to come to you, simplifying your range problems. Most often, cover will be scarce, so you'll have to run up and smack your opponents.
2) The Super Sledge is the only weapon that allows you to choose where your enemies will go. Choose wisely.
3) The Super Sledge deals more damage than any other melee weapon I've encountered, if occasionally by slim margins. This could be confirmation bias. Honestly, though, it's comparable to some very, very heavy weapons, and as stated above its tendency to send people flying is a rare blessing.
4) Go for the eyes. Even on a character with virtually no chance of a critical hit under other circumstances, going for the eyes allows a majority of your hits to be of a Critical nature, and the critical hit table for the eyes is superior to that of any body part, including the head. For a character who is built to get a large number of critical hits to begin with, going for the Eyes makes even Slayer seem a little redundant. And though a good many won't survive to test the matter, a blind opponent is often more dangerous to his allies than one who is merely knocked out, and will often run away. (Note: That's actually annoying as hell, so you may want to learn how to use a rifle by buying a bunch of Guns & Bullets magazines.)
5) The Super Sledge shines its best against melee-dependent enemies such as Deathclaws, a good many bandits, Yakuza, some Super Mutants, and a goodly number of boss monsters. Not everybody uses a gun. What he said about needing to cross that gap by spending AP is true, but it also true for the enemy. For other situations, you may want to just carve your way through the crowd, putting as many of them as possible between you and the enemies who are wielding ranged weapons. That said, he's right about the Mega Power Fist being pretty badass. It doesn't have the same advantages of a Super Sledge, but Unarmed is a fun and hilarious skill in this game without armament. The Mega Power Fist simply makes it practical in everyday combat. (Doesn't mean you won't enjoy Hook Kicking and Palm Striking the antennae off a few giant ants now and then.)
So there are benefits to emphasizing Unarmed over Melee, if only because Unarmed opens up plotlines and is, well, fun in its own right. ...unless Perception was your melee-dependent character's dump stat, in which case you may just be screwed for a good third-level Perk. Depends on how you want to spend your points. Unless you like to have a ranged weapon in your offhand (I mean, other than, say, a grenade), which negates the perk. But so it goes. Not as good a chance at an instant kill as the Eyes table, not as high a likelihood of a critical hit when targetted. A much easier target, but with sufficient skill this is irrelevant.
This may come down to how you want to try to take advantage of the freebies mentioned above. Jinxed is pretty darn amusing if you're genuinely unarmed, though, as this limits the damage you can do to yourself and such attacks require no ammunition. A pretty selective circumstance, though, and not practical. Just thought I'd bring it up.
It's hard to make Jinxed advantageous. Trying to make ammo loss unlikely, such as by using the Super Sledge, sometimes means using weapons which can kill you if you fumble with them.

Anyway, that's my thoughts.

Forgot 2 more sources for unarmed skill: becoming a Prizefighter in New Reno and the punching bag in the basement of the Shark Club. Anyway, I agree that on a typical game someone who is unarmed will probably not be able to train in SF. However, if you were to carefully plan your character development around this, it's fairly simple to do. Just get the car as fast as you can and then head to SF, get the quest to get the vertibird plans, raid Navarro, get a Mega Power Fist and then just do some quests or kill enough baddies (or goodies) until you hit 250 or -250. That's odd. I had a noticeable change in accuracy for called shots when I had this Trait and got my first pair of Spiked Knuckles. It only applies to Unarmed Weapons, not hand to hand. Actually, Awareness is useful regardless of Perception because it allows you to see the health, weapon and ammo of your target.

Good thinking. Still, it is the sort of thing one should bear in mind when one recommends a skill for its tune-up opportunities. *twitch*
I see. On that character build (high Strength, Agility, Endurance; 1 Luck, Jinxed) I probably wouldn't notice, since I was usually using hands only so as to avoid doing a great deal of damage to myself. But it has a minimum Perception in order to get it, you see. It requires a Perception of 5, which isn't always in the cards on a melee build.

I can't imagine any build where having to sacrifice Awareness would be worth it. It is easily one of the most valuable Perks in the game.

There's something very satisfying in going about truly unarmed, especially if you manage to get HTH evade.

A single piercing strike (or jab or whatever) into the eyes, then end turn (giving a 10-20pts AC bonus).

BTW, is there any benefit whatsoever in using a plain kick vs plain punch?
Kick takes one AP more but does the exact same damage?
I think there might be a better chance for knockdown, but cant say for sure.

PS. I almost never take awareness, it's so... cheateyish?

First off, if you've been playing the game since the 90s, sometimes you like to switch things up a little. I was surprised to find out how little I missed Awareness, actually, the first time I played without.
Second off, if you're a hardcore skills junkie, those 4 points of Perception can be very useful for Intelligence without sacrificing your Agility, Endurance, or Luck.
Of course, if you take Gifted, you'll forever languish in most skills, but you can probably get the best of all stats across the board. However, my builds seldom use Gifted. It's simply not my style. It is, for me, a very niche Trait for very specific builds.

Here's the stats of the best primary and secondary punch and kick attacks (from the manual):

Haymaker
Effects: +7 damage, +15% critical
AP Cost: 3
Requires: Unarmed 100%, Agility 7, Strength 5,
Level 9

Piercing Strike
Effects: +10 damage, +40% critical, armor piercing
AP Cost: 8
Requires: Unarmed 130%, Agility 7, Strength 5,
Level 16

Power Kick
Effects: +9 damage, +5% critical
AP Cost: 4
Requires: Unarmed 80%, Agility 6, Strength 6, Level 9

Piercing Kick
Effects: +12 damage, +50% critical, armor piercing
AP Cost: 9
Requires: Unarmed 125%, Agility 8, Strength 6,
Level 15

So Haymaker has 10% more critical chance than Power Kick, but Power Kick does 2 more damage than Haymaker. I'd stick with Haymaker called shots, especially if you have Slayer. I'm not sure how the knockdown mechanics work aside from knockouts and certain critical called shots.

I didn't notice this problem with my last Unarmed character. Then again, I did have a high IN and got the memory module from SAD as soon as possible. I had most essential skills tagged (Unarmed, Speech, Lockpick) and I raised the rest with books as high as I could (actually a little over 120 for most, since I used drugs to lower my stats before reading once I was at 91).

Starting Stats:
ST 5
PE 8
EN 8
CH 2
IN 8
AG 9
LK 7

Ending Stats:
ST 10
PE 9
EN 8
CH 1
IN 9
AG 10
LK 9

Thanks for the tip on the spiked knuckles. Didn't know you could get them that early on. Also, you may know this but I just wanted to put it out there: you can be trained by John Sullivan no matter how high your unarmed.

You're right on the strength, but I have my reasons for starting at seven or eight (see above). Quick pockets is a good idea though. To be honest I never thought of it but now that I do it would definitely work well. The instances in which you will need to heal will require A LOT of stim packs (you'll have 300+ hp by the end of the game). Also, you're right that you could probably pass on educated. You're going to have more skill points than you need to successfully complete the game. This is part of the reason I recommend against tagging lockpick. Once you get your lockpick to ~80, with two master lock pick sets you can pick any non-electronic lock in the game. Consequently, it seems like a waste to tag it. You'll have more than enough skill points to get it to 80 untagged (especially with educated). Additionally, if you follow the build as I suggested it you'll want to get your unarmed and melee up to around 180 which takes a lot of skill points if they're untagged.

The other point is the super sledge. I don't know whether or not it's affected by bonus hth attacks (because I always have the perk by the time I get the weapon itself) but I can tell you that normal attacks take two AP and aimed take three. I'm pretty confident that it's not normally that cheap (and even if it were 2/3 is the same cost as the mega power fist with bonus hth). You're right though, it doesn't benefit from one hander so if you choose this perk it's probably in your best interest to tag a different skill. I thought about choosing trying the build with this trait but ultimately decided against it since it doesn't take a whole lot of skill points to raise your unarmed to the point of always having 95% to hit.

But to expand on my original post, the super sledge is important against other close combat foes because you knock them away and they waste action points getting back close with you. This is a great method of crowd control against powerful hth enemies like deathclaws. Instead of chasing them down you just stand in one place and repeatedly knock them all away as they come in close to engage you. This is especially effective if you take leg shots. Using this strategy it's very possible to kill an entire pack of deathclaws without even taking a hit (unless they start off close to you).

Awesome post dude. I always wondered what the difference between the types of hth attacks were. As many times as I've played through this game I've never actually read the manual. Thanks for posting.