It may be a bit of a slog but SH siege defence (and possibly hitting other fortresses like Fury Towers) is the way to go for soul shards.  This is your target for successful solo SH defences against level 1 Tower of Odin Jottun troops:

Level 4 SH and Tower of Odin;

20 million plus march size;

Tier 7 troops with most of Hero, Tier VI and Tier VII knowledge completed;

Maxed hero with legendary Ubba's set improved to level 3 and higher;

Maxed Raine with legendary fortresses gear improved to level 3 and higher;

It helps to have a suitable, maxed, aesir, relevant town skins, one relevant hero skin and some of the other relevant knowledge but those are not essential to success.  They all reduce losses (little by little).

Improvements to gear tend to be the biggest slog of all as you really have to hit lots of Ubers and Invaders using normal attacks and it is time consuming and boring.

Reaching that point gets you 600k soul shards (or a share if clan mates/allies are joining in) for each march..  Level 1 Tower of Odin provides five marches plus one more which comprises scouts (easier successfully to defend and less soul shards).

You lose between four million and two million TVII troops per march.  I find that if I start with forty million TVII I can successfully defend all five marches without having to pause and train more troops along the way

You are right that after the early and middle part of the game are completed, soul shards become critical so however far off those minimum criteria may seem to be it is worth knowing what the target is.

I should add that it is needful to gain expertise at avoiding interference from others in your defences.  But that comes with experience.  The shorter the time your troops can be in the SH the better, three seconds is a decent target to aim for.

To add to what John said above here

if you siege in peace you can try saturate the stronghold with troops. Put t6 with hero shaman/double and fill up the rest of the stronghold with T7 without hero. 

the idea is for the t6 meatshield to be exchanged as needed and be a shield for your t7 which point is to add to your defensive stat pool. Obviously dont do this during hostile competitions. 

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You may get the chance for 56k x 2000 hero energy for 10 dollar up to several times a month. Its not a bad idea to grab it. 

the packs are greater today than when level 40 first was released. Its written "catch up" all over. There is also over 1b gold available a few times a month. Getting to 40 has gotten a little more trivial. 

These gold packs are also great for secret knowledge to get you abit up to speed despite you dont have the most kill experience thus had the shards on hand to develop military knowledge. You also need to spend alot of gold for some of the town skins. 

Your defintion of cheating seems to  be subject to change, and perhaps not be the same as mine.

You do not seem to care that players are dipping in and out of a clan to get a better draw in competitions though many players think this is manipulation,and therefore a form of cheating.

I believe there might still be cheating going on, certainly I saw something recently that looked to be suspicious behaviour.

Apart from that, anyone who cheated previously, before you closed any loopholes that allowed them to do so, is still cheating now,because they benefited from it, and are further ahead in the game than would have been otherwise.

The two Johns.

This information will be very useful for those players seriously interested in continued participation, however for me, though I enjoy some aspects of the game it's just another indication I am wasting my precious time continuing. 

I was intially mislead into the real nature of the game,and wouldn't be here at all except for the fact I finally got a good deal again on hero energy at Christmas the year I started playing.

Back then an energy shortage was a serious impedement to progress.

A point to make about soul shards and sieges is that peace in the kingdom becomes, once more, highly desirable.  The ability to conduct SH sieges w/o interference accelerates progress considerably.

The clan system is by far and away the best thing that the game has to offer and it is bizarre that Plarium International Ltd is blind to this.  In an age in which translation tools abound it is silly that Plarium International Ltd make it nearly impossible for clans to conduct diplomacy with each other within game.

My kingdom enjoyed two weeks of peace some years back after considerable diplomatic effort (greatly aided by the language skills of the two leading Russian players).  To negotiate peace again after all the intervening years of squabbling would be a considerable diplomatic challenge but to do so with emoji speak as the only shared language and no other available language tools is quite impossible.

It would be trivially easy for Plarium International Ltd to solve this.  Just make an arrangement with a game site hosting service and, voila, conversations in clan site chat rooms would be just a click or two away.  As there are limitations to internet access in Russia best of all would be for the developers to start their own clan hosting site with ease of access for all the nationals who play.  It could be free to Plarium gamers and have tools crafted to be suitable to each of their games.

Of course no such thing is going to happen because Plarium International Ltd are blinkered by their obsession with monetizing their games.  They would do well to pay attention to what Sid Meier says about that.

If your kingdom doesn't want peace then maybe change kingdom? 

Plarium already have translation in other game where they are fully testing it and Vikings will get translation thing this year

I am super impressed: 49ml t4s smashing 195 mil t6 and t7.  The best I ever manage is 9ml t4 losing to 12ml t7s and the millions more t4  5 and 6 they have with them ... I get 600k t4s at the cost of 7mil of my t4s. I am obviously doing something wrong (not that I have 40mil t4s.).

How come there weren't any t4 and t5 in your Jotun march? Our tower is level 2. And I am still palace level 27 so no t7s and only lv 2 knowledge with t6. But thank you to both of you  - all good tips to pass on to the lv 36s in our clan.

We campaigned long and hard to get kingdom peace and apart from the occasional new person who needs to be taught the advantage of kingdom peace it has been great for the last couple of years: anyone is free to farm any tile and active players who lose shield are often notified by other clans instead of being attacked.

I don't know if anyone has replied, but looking at the posts that appear here, you can see in small print and sometimes quickly how many soul shards you have earned compared to the number shown in a siege report.  

i

Ok, xyz, I have forwarded your feedback to the devs👍

If you meet any suspicious activity in the game, please inform the Support Team: https://vikingsweb-support.plarium.com/web/en/problems/

Thanks in advance🙏

That is interesting, BlackShadow.

Nice to know that ONE worthwhile thing appears in that window.

Although my eyes are no longer sharp enough to take in what appears there.