Assassination vs Dueling

[Polemists]

So I was reading Empire Total War over in wikipedia and it mentioned that,

two units: gentlemen and rakes. The former handles diplomatic pursuits and can challenge other characters to a duel to dispose of them honourably, while the latter performs clandestine tasks such as spying, assassination and burglary.

Which makes me ponder,

What is the benefit of killing someone honorably? I mean say your France, and you get a argument with England. You really dislike thier minister of war, or general (not sure who you can/can't kill).

If you walk up and say "Hi, I'm France, I want to fight" and kill them,

is that really more beneficial then sneaking about and killing them?

I assume honorable duels will not make you lose as much dipolomatically but I mean you still killed the guy. Maybe someone can enlighten me on the benefits of dueling, compared to assination.

[Sir Moody]

I would say Dueling offers the chance of killing the target but with a high risk to the unit offering the duel (2 go in...) the cost of failing is probably just the loss of the unit.

Assassination has a far greater chance of the assassin coming out alive even if he fails but if you fail and are caught the diplomatic cost is high.

pure speculation of course...

[Owen Glyndwr]

Remember also that with the addition of a Parliament, you may not be dealing solely with foreign ministers. Perhaps you want to oust the member of the opposition party who is preventing you from warring. Or maybe you want to do away with a rabble-rouser who is trying to gather support for a revolution. If you want to do away with those people without getting your hands dirty, I suppose those would be the reasons for dueling.

[Sheogorath]

Dueling might also cause traits.
For instance, if one of your generals constantly declines duels he might get a negative trait. 'Coward' or something similar. That is, before he snaps under the constant nagging of his wife to stand up for himself.

[PBI]

I wonder if Gentlemen act something like Inquisitors in MTW, as an alternative route to assassination for characters with high security but with low duelling ability (or piety for Inquisitors). Also, I should imagine a successful elimination by duelling would be consequence-free diplomatically, since the Gentleman could claim he was merely defending his honour.

[Polemists]

I wonder if Gentlemen act something like Inquisitors in MTW

If they kill all my sons, I'm filing a complaint :P

[Pantsalot]

Dueling might also cause traits.
For instance, if one of your generals constantly declines duels he might get a negative trait. 'Coward' or something similar. That is, before he snaps under the constant nagging of his wife to stand up for himself.

This seems a likely one but more like instead of chilvary with the dread, then it will be honour & dread,
as we r no longer in the era that there really is such a thing as chilvary, now it's about being a posh
snob.