As Erebus, I can buy Tier 2 archers, sell, Tier 1 monks, sell, then I can still have enough for scalemail and mana potions. I don't find it cheating personally but it IS annoying, if you know that he's doing it, focus on his minions instead of the Demigod. One bug that I've noticed is that if you sell your idol while it's on cooldown the idol summon hotkey will still function correctly, yet it won't summon minions or use mana.
Brumski
I would agree that 3 Reguli would dominate, they could mine the crap out of all the flags while sniping everything in sight.
I recently discovered this while in Cruxible, I was playing Torchbearer while my teammate was Erebus. Our enemies were Rook and Sedna, a pushing force to be dealt with. We were playing a towers game and I was having an extremely hard time making it to the other side while Erebus was doing fine. What is it exactly? It's either capturing a flag or placing a ward down. enabling the weaker players to teleport to that location. Who should do it? Prefferably the most mobile/strong p
IMO it's not exploiting. The totems only grant you the ability to summon the minions, once summoned they belong to you and not the totems. A smart player will know how to keep is minions alive for as long as possible while a dumb player will have them killed.
I haven't tested it out myself but I would agree on buying the idols and then selling them, a good general should be able to keep his lot alive for some time before going back and by that time you should be buying tier 2/3 idols anyway.