Basically it involves abusing ghosts soul draining ability.
Find an enemy group with ghosts in it and kill off all the other stacks. Then let the ghosts kill your troops for many turns until the ghost stack is however big you want it. Flee the battle and comeback and kill the ghosts for a lot more experience then the original army would have given you. Theoretically you could make the ghost stack as big as you want, up to whatever limit there is for armies in this game ( which I don't know what that is ).
There are several ways to pull this stunt off. The usual inquisitor / phantom trick and use the phantoms to attack the ghosts since ghosts soul drain off phantoms ( which doesn't make sense but whatever ). This gives you unlimited mana through rage and fodder for the ghosts to soul drain from. Only problem is inquisitors are slow and so you have to get the real inquisitor stack close to the ghosts which can be dangerous and requires you to cast slow or something.
Then there's the transmute / resurrection trick. With transmute level 3 you can have a stack of, say, peasants and just let the ghosts hit them and resurrect the peasants ad infinitum because you will get 20 mana whenever the peasants are killed, which is enough for a level 1 resurrection. The problem is even with around a 80+ int and a level 3 magic light a level 1 resurrection still doesn't resurrect that many peasants, so its gonna take a while to build that stack of ghosts.
The third way which I have not quite tested fully is to phantom veteran orcs who get 3 potions of rage at level 3 adrenaline, which is 15 total rage, which = 15 mana which is = to a level 1 phantom. If you surround a stack of veteran orcs with enough level 3 totems of adrenaline ( a chaos magic spell ) then when you make a phantom of them the phantom will get max adrenaline and access to all 3 potions of rage PLUS he gets +20 health and PLUS there is an artifact called "the peace pipe" that decreases orc attack by 50% and increases their health by 25%, a perfect candidate for soul draining. Also the orcs with potions of rage have a really high speed, like 7+ depending on how much adrenaline, so your original orc stack can be on the other side of the field well out of reach of the ghosts.
The fourth way is to use summoners like Chosha's to summon gobots ( probably the best ) and have those get killed by the ghosts. Doesn't take any mana but doesn't work too well either after a certain point. However you can combine this with another trick to get unlimited gold, using phantomed marauders and search to search the corpses of the summoned troops. More on this below.
As for the ghosts themselves you can slow them down by 1 with that artifact that slows flyers. As long as you have a target near them they will attack that and won't go closer toward your other troops. Making some walls with your pet can help too. The computer doesn't like to waste time knocking down a wall when it can go around, even if going around would mean a huge waste of movement.
As you can guess doing this with a warrior would be better since a warrior has a lot more leadership then a mage. This means more phantomed troops to throw at the ghosts and faster overall ghost growth. And really, assuming you can get enough magic runes, a warrior can come pretty close to a mage in intellect.
Just for the record, as I'm sure you know there are several ways to get unlimited gold and a way to get unlimited runes.
The runes is obvious and I'm sure you know that you can just start a battle, dig all the chests and then run and repeat, ad infinitum. A small percentage of chests will yield runes. And you can get unlimited gold this way too, and unlimited ancient knowledge scrolls, and theoretically eventually any spell you missed ( I think ). The trick is getting enough rage, but it's pretty easy since you can just summon a chaos dragon near your own troops and its initial damage spell will kill them and give you rage, plus you have a highly mobile troop to go around and open all the chests without running into the enemy. It's best if your facing a slow group of enemies like dwarves on techron.
Another way to get gold is to abuse the search ability ( marauders and one of the goblin troops ) combined with a summoner troop like choshas, just have the gobots die and search their corpses with a phantomed marauder. Do this on the Reha continent for maximum gold. You don't have to actually fight any monsters on Reha, you can just go to Reha and suppress or upgrade an item and the battlefield will yield the Reha gold bonus from chests. I assume the same with spells.
Another way which is probably the cheesiest of all is if you have the UN-UPGRADED snake ring and go to the wizards tower in Debir. Go inside and load up on troops, then choose to upgrade the snake ring and run from the battle. As far as I know the snake ring is the only artifact that lets you run from the battle. After you run you will appear in Debir in and you will receive a certain amount of gold based on the troops you had. Since you can fully recruit to max leadership for free in the wizards tower this can be a pretty hefty sum, especially when your leadership is 10000+. This is the fastest way to gain unlimited gold as far as I know and by far the closest to cheating.
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