Every Sovereign has a profession that gives them a boost and makes them special compared to your average Champion. Lets break them down. Feel free to disagree and discuss.
Adventurer This profession allows you to hire champions you have access to for free. Access is depending on kingdom/empire and tech research. How good is this? From the start this saves you about 100 gold on your first champion. AS the game progresses, it can save you thousands of gold. Some of the higher caliber Champions cost over a thousand gold, this will let you higher them for free. This is an excellent profession.
Armorer This gives every unit, champion, sov, everything a +25% bonus to their defense. It's great.
Bandit Lord This profession allows you to hire bandits you meet in in combat for 25 gold and you start with two bandits from the start of the game. The bandits you start off with are useful only in the very early part of the game, but can make the very early part of the game easier. Hiring new bandits can be fun, and can bolster your ranks early in the game, but, they are weak troops and you are pretty limited in your options. There are no good bandits to hire, and frankly 25 gold is rather expensive for what is available. This is really a newbie crutch of a profession, It's really not very good, as much as I think the idea is fun, the problem is bandits really suck and will only be of marginal use and your money is better used elsewhere.
BeastLord This gives you the Tame ability, so with some mana cost, you can tame almost any enemy that is a "beast". The beast can resist. There are a lot of useful beast out there from Great Wolves and their Howl ability, to Umbredroths toughness and overpower, to Giant ass Hoarderspiders with tons of HP. Great choice.
Diplomat This profession gives you a 30% trade bonus with the AI, 20 influence and the Silver tongue ability. I can't really say how good the 30% bonus in trade is, I have used Diplomat and have traded, but can't ever think that I really noticed a huge difference, as the AI tends to rape you in deals. The silver Tongue ability is a really fun one, it allows you to bribe a trained unit from the enemy during combat to switch sides. It has it's limitations, you can't get Jugs this way, but it's a fun thing to do. Want some Tarth Archers or Capitar warhorse knights? Silver Tongue them and they are yours. But, it cost 30 influence to do, and the ability only gives you 20 influence, so you can't even use the ability once unless you happen to find a prestigious location or level a town and build an influence building, but it's not something you are likely to be able to use early. Overall, this isn't a bad choice, it's rather fun, but overall mediocre.
General This gives the Sov's army a +25% exp bonus. Big bonus and this is an very good choice.
Hunter This gives you a +50% damage to beast. This is fairly useless. Beast are rarely your biggest concerns in this game. It's nice to do extra damage to spiders and the occasional umberdroth, but most beast are not that difficult to defeat in the first place and this ability will not do much to help you win the game. It sucks.
Noble This gives you +1 faction prestige and -5% to unrest to all your cities. +1 faction pretige is pretty much nothing, it can be slightly helpful in the early game with growing your first city, but it's barely noticable. -5% unrest in your cities is marginally useful in some instances, but pretty much unnoticeable overall. Very weak profession
Summoner This gives all your summons +2 levels and access to the Summon Shadow Warg Spell. This is also a Newbie crutch profession The shadow warg is helpful in the early game, but soon losses relevance and Summoning as a whole is pretty weak. There are very few summons that are worth a shit. And even if there were good summons, "Level" increases don't really make a unit all that much more powerful, really only gives them more HP. Maybe if you get summon earth elemental and take this with a lot of other summoning bonuses, you can summon a single useful earth elemental, but is it really worth it? Fuck no, this sucks.
Warlock This increases the damage of your Sov's spells by 50%. It's pretty damn good. Solid choice.
Warlord This decreases unit wages by 50%. Half priced troops? Yes please. This is a pretty solid choice, only made not fantastic by the fact that you probably don't need a lot of trained troops, but if you like to build large armies, this is excellent.
