farming valleys for medals

There are 3 types of attacks:

1. Attack Valley - "Valleys" it seems, are any piece of land that does not look like a village or castle. They can be Flatlands, Grassy, Hills, Swamp, Lake. If you click on one, it will be in one of 3 states: 1. Owned by a non alliance player (attackable) or 2. Owned by an alliance player (reinforceable), 3. Owned by noone (attackble). The latter is the ideal one to attack.
2. Attack NPC - These are cities owned by barbarians and much harder to attack. There are posts on how to attack these.
3. Attack Player - This is the juice of the game and you'll get to these much later.

This guide focuses on attacking valleys. Why attack valleys? There are 2 good reasons to attack valleys
1. Gain medals - In order to gain prestige, complete quests, get promotions, build more cities, you must acquire a set number of certain medals. Refer to your quest screen under promotions.
2. Gain experience for your heroes - A victory against a valley grants experience to your heroes. Enough experience allows you to upgrade your heroes. From what I gathered, which hero to select for attacking for Valleys all depends on which one you want to level up. Just be careful to send a little more troops if your hero has below 60 atk power. When upgrading heroes, only upgrade their highest attribute and leave the rest low.

Before you start your FIRST attack make sure you have at least 1000 warriors, just to be safe. Recruit a hero with at least 60 of your chose attribute. Make sure you have at least 2 heroes because one of them will be your mayor and he/she can't leave town.

OK, Here's the actual guide

1. Scout a low level valley as close to your city as possible. For your sake, try a level 1. This should take less than a minute. Edit: You should not need a hero for scouting on level 1's.
2. You'll get a scouting report that will tell you how many soldiers there are in that valley.
3. Now Attack that valley with 10x the soldiers and your chosen hero. i.e. If it has 150 mix match soldiers, send 1500 warriors. Edit: You can throw in some archers, how much? Youll have to use the Exercise screen in the Rally Point screen. I've been told that a 10:1 ratio increases the probability. This will take 10-60 minutes depending on how far you are from your valley.
4. Once the valley is defeated, you'll get an Attack Report. Read the report, scroll down. That will tell you if you got a medal (or not), how much experience your hero got and a few others.
5. Recall your soldiers. Returning to your city will take the same time as attacking.

These next 2 steps are speculation. From what I've read recently, it may be better to leave that valley alone for an hour (from your last attack)
6. When they arrive back at your town, click on the valley you attacked earlier and abandon it and immediately...
7. ... Repeat Steps 3 to 6 over and over again until you get the medals you want. Don't get disheartened if you don't acquire any medals after 10-15 attacks, It's happened to me before.

Once you get more confident, make more soldiers and do 2-5 attacks on other valleys. Of course, you'll have to build more warriors.

My goal was to get just enough medals so that I could get my promotions on rank and titles so that I could build more cities.

Start attacking higher level cities as your need for medals start to require higher level valleys.

TIPS:
1. Rather than abandoning a valley as mentioned in Step 6 above, go attack another one. Having a Flag on a valley increases your resource production based on what's shown for the tooltip. So just recall your soldiers and don't abandon. However, you can only put up as many flags as your Town Hall Level. ie, if your Town Hall is level 4, you can take advantage of 4 production bonuses.

Do I need to have a open spot so as to "take the city" or do I just need to have a victory over troops?

also do flats (where you can build a city if able) also drop medals?

yes aparently you need to actually contro the locatopn for a chance to get a medal

"flats" are just another typ of valley so should work the same

Since a lot of you probably needs some medals, I've decided to share my knowledge with you.

The progress is:

1) Get at least 15k-20k archers (this just minimizes troop losses, you don't need this many)
2) Fill up your valley capacity
3) Search for unoccupied lvl 10 valleys near you (lower level valleys work, but not as well)
4) Scout them - this is important, you'll want to avoid valleys with cavalry or archers as they'll cause you to have casualties.
5) Select the valley(s) you want to attack - obviously more valleys and more archers gets you more medals!
6) Send in the archers
7) Read the battle report
Wait 1 hour for the valley to respawn
9) Go to step 6)

Some might think that this is the hard/long way to do it, but I've found 140+ medals in 2 weeks (640+ attacks) doing this - AND LOSING NO TROOPS. Heroes have had attack 40-150 and intelligence 16-120, all loyalty 100, and they've all found a pretty much equal amount of medals!

The next thing you might want to know, is where to search for certain medals or how different valleys drop medals. My experience is:

Flats: 24% drop rate, based on 138 attacks
Primarely: Rose Medals
Secondary: Lion, Cross
Rare: Nation

Deserts: 22% drop rate, based on 158 attacks
Primarely: Lion
Secondary: Justice
Rare:

Lakes: 9% drop, based on 11 attacks (I keep lvl 10 lakes)
Primarely: Cross
Secondary:
Rare:

Swamps: 13% drop rate, based on 40 attacks
Primarely: Freedom
Secondary:
Rare: Justice, Nation

Forests: 25% drop rate, based on 73 attacks
Primarely: Courage
Secondary: Honor, Rose
Rare:

Hills, 29% drop rate, based on 129 attacks
Primarely: Courage
Secondary: Wisdom
Rare: Freedom, Honor

Grassland: 16% drop rate, based on 95 attacks
Primarely: Lion
Secondary:
Rare: Rose, Nation

You might experience different drop rates or other findings than me, but I think these are good guidelines. I am NOT saying than you for example CAN'T find Honor medals in Grassland valleys, I'm just saying that it's been unlikely for ME to find other than what's desribed here.
The only medal which I now have less than 15 of, is the Freedom Medal - I only have 14 of those...