About Champion Skull

[Lazy_Perfectionist]

I often use it to season my assassins.

On a related note, experience can bring precision and morale boosts. Precision is twice as effective over 10, and not all nations have any access to eyes of aiming.

On indie priests, to, it can result in 50% more leadership, if you've got nothing better to hand it off to. I haven't seen it affect magic or undead leadership, though. Though it migth on inborn (not path dependent, say Mound King), undead leaders. On my Angakok, experience takes me from 80->100 leadership. I'm not really sure how it functions.

Exp 1 star...
+1 Attack, +1 Defense, +1 Precision, +leadership (mundane), +1 morale,
no affect on hitpoints, strength, protection, magic resistance, encumberance.

There are probably other effects of experience (including research) but that's all I see off the top of my head.

Nothing spectacular, but not bad for an item whose effects last even after you've taken it away from your high risk unit.

[MaxWilson]

I wouldn't use the skull on researchers, since they gain experience from researching anyway. They usually all end up with one star quite quickly, and two stars (50 xp) will take forever even with the skull.

I've been meaning to check and see whether the skull gives experience to your troops too, like that one site, Academy of War. And... unfortunately it doesn't. I might use the skull for precision boosts to mages, but nothing else and probably not even that.

-Max

[Saulot]

Perhaps it would be a good idea as Jazzepi suggests to give it a nice boost to +5 exp? I certainly like the concept of the skull, and would like it to be moved away from the 'usually not used' category of items.

[MaxWilson]

IIRC winning a battle is worth 4 xp (1 for being in a battle, 4 for winning a battle), so the skull is like winning a battle every turn. The problem is that every time you "hit" in a battle, it's worth 1 xp, so thugs tend to ratchet up experience quickly and don't need the skull, while armies don't benefit from the skull. It's a bit of a puzzle how to use the skull effectively. I guess it might be nice to let newly-born thugs start their first battle with 1 star instead of 0. 2 stars would take about 15 turns, which IMHO isn't really worth it. Even at +5 per turn it probably wouldn't be worth the wait except in peacetime.

-Max

[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...

[Edi]

Another situation where a champion skull might come handy is making a combo of it with the Academy of War site, or with The Ancient Master for even greater effect.

[Jazzepi]

I'd really like to see this item upgraded to +5 XP. A small change would make it useful. As it stands, it's one of those "no niche" items that is completely useless.

Jazzepi

[Slough_Gairn]

MaxWilson does the Academy of War give experience to your troops?