Using assassins for expansion

[Festin]

There are several nations with good recruitable assassins, which, as I understand, can be used to expand through indies with relative ease. My question is: how exactly does it work?
1)How do I know, how many commanders do the indies have? If I assassinate one of two commanders and attack, will it weaken the indies?
2)Do indie commanders reappear? Meaning, do I have to assassinate them and attack the province with other troops at the same turn?
Any other advice is welcome too, of course

[Torin]

They dont reappear.
The best way to know how many commanders the indy province has is to attack with a single commander with retreat orders. you loose nothing and you get to see the exact forces in that province.

still that expansion is unreliable unless your assasins are strong, good if you get an assasin right away (abysia?), but if you recruit an assasin then you are not recruiting a mage...

[Festin]

Well, some nations have mage-assassins )

By the way, if I attack with retreat orders, and there are no more commanders in that province - will I get the province?

[lch]

Originally Posted by Festin

Well, some nations have mage-assassins )

By the way, if I attack with retreat orders, and there are no more commanders in that province - will I get the province?

That depends entirely on who is faster with retreating from the battlefield completely - your commander or the enemy troops, routing without guidance.

[thejeff]

It's a tricky balance.

You want to set your commander to hold long enough and/or far enough forward to let a retreating enemy escape before he does, but for him still to retreat fast enough if they're attacking.

[zlefin]

another way is to just keep assassinating until a month where there's no assassination fight, this means there's no commanders left in the province, so an ycommander can take it by just walking in (either the assassin themself, or some other person you have for the purpose); this takes a little longer, but it's a little easier to manage than attacking with a guy earlier to count how many commanders there are, and then keeping track of the kills so you know when it's empty. If renaming is on, i suppose you could rename the assassin to keep track of the commanders left in a province.
Zlefin

[cohenfr]

I don't if this can be useful, but with ctis I sometimes take indie provinces with an empoisonner: I order him to assassinate ennemi commander (select a province with only commanders, no knights or strong indies). With the indies set to 8 there usually are 3 commanders. When the empoisonner set to assassinate doesn't attack anybody, this mean that there is no more commander. You can now take the province with the empoisonner.

[vfb]

The number of commanders depends on the poptype of the province. Edi's DB lists these. But Torin's suggestion to send in a probing commander is a good one. That way you'll notice extra priests etc.

Horse Tribes usually just have one commander. Amazons and Tribals have two, but Amazons have bodyguards usually. Lizards can also have bodyguards I think.

It's a bit of a waste to use an assassin to take ownership of a province on the turn after the commanders are all dead. Any indy commander or scout can do that, on the same turn the last commander dies. Indy commanders at the back on Holdx4,Retreat usually survive if you miscount or your assassin fails.

[Festin]

Yes, lizard shamans can have bodyguards. The rare Bakemono indies also have them.

Judging by above comments, looks like the best way to use assassins is to pair them with scouts or commanders.
Turn one - assassin moves into a province, scout attacks it and counts commanders. Turn two - assassination, scout either moves to capture the province, or waits for next turn, etc.

[NTJedi]

Any assassin can usually win 99% of independent provinces if carrying a bottle of water (Water Elemental). Just setup the assassin to hold, hold, hold, attack rear. The elemental does all the work.