Quote Originally Posted by Doomsteed View Post
sorry for the late reply.

If you read the guide it says to have maximum valleys so you do not capture them.

I have no evidence to support if there is a better/worse chance of getting medals when you dont capture the valley. However capturing and releasing the valley will change the units inside, so you may go from a 30k warrior valley to a valley full of archers and cavs, meaning you cannot hit it for 0 losses anymore.
You still get medals if you capture the valleys, it sounds like about as many.

The down side is, as you say, that you reset the troop compositions in the valleys that you hit.

What this means is that eventually they are full of nasty stuff and you have to start hitting things 30 miles from your cities and it takes forever and so on.

The way you do it sounds much better.