There is no easy way to hack this, so all you noobs trying to get mana/gold/crystals/glory points just go home and stop giving people like mati a headache.
Game sends encrypted packets that contain those values. Your game receives them and sends them back to get confirmed. This happens almost instantly.
Intercept the packet before it gets sent back to the server and change the value. That's your only option of actually obtaining whatever value of gold/mana/etc you want without hacking the server data base itself.
To intercept it you need to write a code and inject it that will find EXACTLY the one packet out of thousands that contains the value you want to change and changes it before it sends it back to the server.
Writing the code and injecting isn't hard. Any dummy can learn that in a couple hours/days at most. The fun part is that those packets have random generated numbers attached to them that get verified. So how do you find the random generated number for the packet to modify its content? If you know how, please share, then we can all have infinite mana/gold/whatever. Till then this is all a waste of time.
As for getting banned using a damage hack, there's a couple ways they find you. The battle is done offline, but the packet sent to the server contains the amount of turns/damage done to the monsters. If your damage exceeds what the threshold is, you're banned. There's no way someone could just beat the hardest difficulty in 2 turns. Best way is probably to ask high level players what their nuke monsters can put out, and use those values for your damage. You probably won't be beating everything, but it puts you at a huge advantage and is safe.
As for the group, get a skype group going, easiest way to stay organized, and only get people in that can code and have understanding. writing a 'hello word' in java/c++ isn't coding.