Actually I rather think a Humakti commander would be more likely to win battles and hence his men would be more likely to survive, their very indifference to the individual lives under their command would be an asset. Very often in battles it is necessary for commanders to take the tough choice between saving a unit of men or instead exploiting a weakness in the enemy, being willing to leave a unit to certain death is the correct thing to do in these circumstances even if it does not make you a nice person.
Historically soldiers have tended to flock to commanders who win battles, regardless of whether they were nice men. Given the ratio of casualties in winners/losers of a battle this is a rational and sensible thing to do.
>
> Huh? Now what have I missed? Humakti are the honorable fighters,
no
> ambushes, all that stuff.
True but ambushes are only really useful up to a point, once large armies are deployed the sheer scale of the thing tends to mean that it becomes a matter of pitched battles and the ambushers/skirmishers become an auxiliary force. Troops who can walk straight into battle without fear of personal death are a big asset, it was essentially this ability to close in packed formations so each man could scarcely defend himself that enabled the Greek phalanx to defeat much larger Persian armies. To quote a historian (Hanson) "The Persians suffered from that most dangerous tendency in war: a wish to kill but not to die in the process". I would expect anyone facing a Humakti formation to be as unnerved as the Persians apparently were by the Greeks.
Leonidas' last ditch stand at Thermopylae should be classic inspiration for Humakti commanders, just as the subsequent ruse used by the Athenians to sink the Persian fleet is more classically Orlanthi.
-- Nic
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