This seems to work pretty well to get high damage output from a general.  I'm not really sure though.  Here's the basic idea, you can summon additional minions of the same type provided you have a different idol.  Right off the bat, if you do your buying and selling correctly, you can easily have 4 archer types and 4 melee types as soon as the cooldowns finish.  What you'd want to use this with is a demigod that has some sort of group heal mechanism(because once the minions from a specific idol die, you will need to rebuy that idol to field the minions) and you want to get the minion upgrades as well as whatever allows you healing.  This way you can field large armies that have significant damage output.  The drawback of course is the following:  If you die, you lose it all.  This is worse than normal because you have to wade through multiple cooldowns and deal with the gold resell penalty to redevelop your army.  This might be too much of a gambit for it to be a good idea to play full on but it seems to be a very effective opening as it allows you to easily overpower enemy demigods early on.