Kingdoms is fundamentally flawed - it is more efficient for established players to 'conquer' new players, and take their village(s) after allowing the new players to develop the village for them. As a new player you will lose your village to an unstoppable force from an established player every 3 to 4 weeks of playing. Any premium tokens or card packs that you bought to help develop your village only benefit the conquering player as you must start a new village over. Rinse and repeat.
A game like this should work a la Travian, where new players cannot lose their first village to another player. Diplomacy is an important part of Kingdoms, so if an established player decides to crush the little guy, it's possible to pillage him and take his resources, or knock down a few buildings. But it costs the established guy and there is no system to actively encourage him to do this.
When it comes to the established player buying a charter for a new village (and building it up from scratch) vs training a captain and conquering a newbies village that has been worked on for a couple of weeks already, it's way more efficient to take the new guy's investment and leave him with nothing. Of course the new guy can start over, and buy more cards, but he will never be able to defend his village against the established player.
This ill-considered loophole means that paying players are eliminating new customers from the game, depriving Firefly studios of money from this title. Which, after my experience in-game and the lack of support from customer services in trying to transfer some of my purchases to one of their newer, slightly less PvP focused servers... I would say is a good thing. Paying customers should be earned, not taken for granted, Firefly.
I would suggest to anybody considering Stronghold Kingdoms to steer clear and instead pick up a cheap copy of the original 2001 Stronghold game, which is by far the best of the bunch from this franchise. Alternatively, have a look for other, more popular real-time building MMOs -there are many to choose from, without the same lose-everything-you-paid-for-to-an-established-player design that Stronghold Kingdoms has.