I've found that there are a few issues that need to be addressed, but two big ones that I want to discuss here are:

The initial start of the game
The initial build up of castles

There is a big issue with the slow starts to rounds nowadays. As most of us started playing many years ago in the days of dial up and no cell phones, the slow pace worked. We grew up with that and got used to it. That is not how the attention span of new players works.

We could already cut the initial protection time in half without changing a thing and it wouldn't really affect the game in any negative way. The idea of "go through your own ticks" is cool, but too easily abusable to min max, as it has been stated. We really just need to speed things up. Some people suggest a tick every half hour, I hate that idea. Some suggest starting with more land, and I could go either way on that. Some purists believe it has to be OLD Thardferr where we start with 10 and work our way up. But Old Thardferr is awful for the modern age. I loved it then, but it won't thrive today.

I simply believe that each hour needs to have more production. Same land constraints, but increased resource productions and increased army productions. Increase the amount of land we can find per hour, something that scales like up to 10% with 3 chances (which is what it already is in the very beginning with when we start with 10 land and can find up to 3). This alone would speed things up considerably. But as it is, when we get to 100+ land, with a farseeing active, at most you can go up 6% which is 1% per chance. It only scales down from there as we acquire more land.

You might think that having 3, or 6 chances (with farseeing) to gain 10% is too much considering that could find 60 land when we're at 100. But I think that's perfect. For one, it would make you land fat, For two, you likely couldn't even build up that land in an hour or two. And for 3, once you hit the 45 land per castle mark, you'd stop anyway. This just accelerates that part and gets to the more fighting part quicker. All of this would also reduce the time of initial protection to likely around 40 hours or less.

And this works in synchronicity with my next thought.

The biggest issue I see with the early Castle Build up phase is that it's too punishing in the beginning. This also relates to why @Blahblahblah felt that he needed to restart.

When as players we have 10 or more castles, the max amount of your kingdom you can lose is 10%. It decreases until you make it to the next bracket of 20 castles, then again, the MAX you can get set back is 10%.
In the beginning, the MINIMUM you lose is 50% and slowly it build up to 10%. That seems completely backwards to me. It also deters fighting early on. And while I love the percent chance of losing castles, the fact that the land ratio is still as if you lost the castle, this problem is not resolved. I'm not allies with Sinny, but I do think that he shouldn't have lost 2/3 of his kingdom from 2 attacks.

I propose the solution of, the first 10 castles don't require 30 hours to build. You pay for them, you get them the next hour. After that back to normal.

Next, I think that when we have less than 10 castles, if a castle is lost, we only lose 10% of the land that we have. This simply makes it match the max that you can lose at the rest of the round. It isn't punishing to small kingdoms and makes us able to grow again.

I can already hear @AdinTheDark pointing out how this would make less fighting, and I agree that we need more fighting in the game. So here's how we do that.

Two things we need to do are; increase armies and decrease protection. Protection is the biggest thing that slows down attacking. And the feature like retals, literally bypass that making protection 0 hours for that one person. That's great to me. I do believe that we should have protection, but much shorter amounts. This wouldn't even affect CLI or retal rights, just shorten them.

We need to increase army production rates severely. I mean that we should be able to build up a reasonably large TC army (like 0.8:1 ghs) in about 5 hours, and have about 10 hours of protection. This would mean that with those about 5 hours extra, a small buffer of resources could get built up for the next fight. It also means that you could reasonably break protection and get back in the fight sooner.

If this were the case, everyone would be attacking A LOT. Maybe too much, but those numbers can always be tweaked. At least it wouldn't feel like the end of the game when you get your army wiped out. It would require skill , coordination, and strategy to get ahead. All the things that we love.

Thank you for reading this, I hope it can at the very least spark some creative ways to combat these two issues.

As always, criticisms are welcome!