[Edi]

I once used a skull pretty effectively. It was in Dom2, a game with CB Blood of Humans Abysia and one of my Newts got the Adept researcher heroic ability. He managed to rack up enough kills with Fire Darts that he was near the top of the Hall of Fame by the time I had enough mages to pull him off the front lines and I stuck him in a lab with a Champion's Skull so it took something like 30 turns before he finally dropped out of the Hall. He has something like 30 research point total, 3 from his F1, 2 from the modded research bonus and 25 from the ability. There were times when he counted for nearly a third of my entire research...