[Amorphous]

Fair enough.

If I understand you correctly your stance is that assassins are sometimes (very rarely) useful and the other arguments you presented were about situations when they are not useful. This makes sense and is the sort of thing I was after - it was not at all clear to me before that this is what you meant. I was certainly not trying to bait you into anything.

It also seems to me that it is a possibility that I find assassins slightly more useful than you do because of play-style. Other than as a fun SP strategy (thereby requiring practically no efficiency at all) I do not think that I have ever included assassins in a pre-planned strategy. When I have used them it has been because they were the most efficient tool for a job at hand.

I have occasionally found it useful to build one on maps with a couple of dead-end provinces, when diverting armies to the task would have required quite a few extra turns of those armies producing nothing worthwhile. It does cost you a fort turn, but I like early forts, so with some nations that cost is not prohibitive. The experimenting I have done with them after they fulfilled their function have usually had decent results, meaning that given the right circumstances, recruiting the assassin would have been a good move even without the province capture.

That said, I think I have only done this with nations with particularly good assassins. It would be rather dicey trying province capture with an ordinary human assassin.