[Starbelly Geek]

Assassins work well on elephant provinces when you have expensive troops that are hard to mass early in the game. For example, Abyssia can send an assassin to knock off the commanders of an elephant province over a few turns while the troops are taking out multiple other provinces without being trampled. Sure, you could probably just take the province brute force, but you'd lose a few troops that wouldn't die as quickly against standard indies.

When an assassin doesn't find a commander in the province, you don't get any report in the turn messages. Or I don't, anyway.