kinda useless until the developers integrate it into the game.

It's a good idea that the minions die when you sell the idol, they should really consider to change that with the next patch.

Hopefully the availability of mods starts to put pressure on GPG/SD to add mod support to the game.

On one hand, I like it. Fixes an obvious problem... 6 extra minions is a bit of a problem. However, on the other, I buy Archers and priests at the start of the game that way. I mean, I guess that it's not a big loss, but I always thought that it would be better if the minions died when you bought the higher level idol. But then again, that caters to how I play.

As I said, I'm biased on the issue. In most cases, kill the minion once, and they won't be summoning them back, unless they keep the idol like I do(no reason to keep the archer idol, those things never die, that's what makes buying the priests such a good investment, and keeping the priest idol is important, as they do have a tendancy to get hit).  Also, the generals already start out fairly slow as it is, and minions aren't exactly the hottest thing in the world until you can get enough to really cause some damage, and by then, you may or may not exactly have too much time left for them to really be useful anyway.

Although I definetly agree that you should never have more then one set of each type of minion at a time. 8 archers or priests is just stupid powerful. 8 minotaurs is still laughable though.