I understand you need to keep upgrading the game to keep from players getting bored and your top spenders from leaving, however to achieve new lifetime customers you need to bridge the gap or protect new customers to keep them in the game long enough to want to spend money.
Suggestions:
1) make it so we can send more than rss to each other (materials, gems, speed ups and such) or set up a trading post (which i have stated over and over on your fb page). The trader post can allow players to "sell" things they have in large quantities to the trader and the smaller players to "buy" them with in game gold, or rss (like X amount of rss can get X amount of speed ups, shields extra).
2) you have set it up where less than five or six cites they kill troops but not take rss, increase this level so big players cant take everything from new players and make them quit.
3) in influence increasing you already have the code that shows if someone demolishes a building points are taken away, DO THIS IN CVC! if a clan attacks a clan that is not their enemy in cvc then points get deducted from their overall cvc scores. You set us up with clans our size but we fight players five or ten times our sizes as they are in our kingdom fighting bigger clans.
4) limit the size player who can go to new kingdoms when opened up. for say about a year. We have 60 and 100 bill or higher players porting in to new kingdoms and taking over. If players dont play by their rules they get wiped out as they are not big enough to make bigger rewards to protect themselves, they have no chance to learn how to fight, defend or use POPS, or fight/defend in kvk/kvkr as they are matched to bigger players who ported in to join their kingdom and have no chance to really learn the game. So you then lose potential new lifetime customers you could have due to them seeing it is a waste to spend money if they have no real chance to grow.
5) Stop making so many kingdoms....merge older kingdoms to keep from overloading your systems. If you see only 1 to 3 really active clans then merge them. If a city is less than 21 and is inactive for a year delete the excess storage on your severs and get rid of those cities. If Sh or clans has no active players for over a year, delete information (as the kingdom is paired to the clans that are made in kingdoms to other clans but if most of the clans are dead then you are not paired up properly for kvk and kvkr) (this also helps you by freeing up space on servers, re-purposing severs after merges and not overloading your systems, this is better for palrium and will save them money in the long run)
6) if leader goes inactive for 2 weeks then have it go to the next most active player starting with elders and moving down so as not to totally lose a SH or a Clan that has been built if a player cant get into leadership account or they simply leave the game.
I like vikings, and have actually played for several years, some updates i love others not so much. The biggest disappointment is not being able to bring in new players to the game and being able to keep them so you are not constantly fighting the same players over and over again. Hope you really pay attention to your customers and hope this helps to give you ideas on gaining new lifetime customers for the game.